Forty Guns (1957)

Good start, but then it gets ruined

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

One of the most independent of Directors, Sam Fuller is much more popular today among movie buffs and critics than he ever was as a working film maker. He constantly fought studio execs and was in and out of the system more than Sam Peckinpah.He often worked with low budgets but that never restrained him from delivering interesting, Avant-Gard, surreal, personal films that are most often a different take or a clear-lens look at some of the subjects that Hollywood sidestepped and ignored.This existential Western should be examined as a precursor to what was to follow in the coming decades. A distorted view of the genre that stands out among the glut of 50's TV and Big Screen Westerns. It is pulp fiction, a paperback like, sultry, lurid, in your face style that is fun, sensitive, brutal, and so direct that it is stunning. The "High-Ridin Woman with a Whip" song is so breathtakingly irritating and so intensely promiscuous that it sets the stage for what is to come. One of the most offbeat, stylish and entertaining offerings of any genre. One cannot view this one with indifference. You will notice it and remember it.

Forty Guns is a hoot -- a weird mix of western noir, musical (Really? 'Woman with a Whip?' That's a song?) and comedy ("I've never kissed a gunsmith before." "Any recoil?") all bundled up into a traditional cowboy tale with lots of steely eyed stares and deliberate walks down a dusty main street, hand clenched near a pistol aching to be drawn.Barbara Stanwyck is tremendous, as always, as the headstrong (was she ever anything else?) ranch owner who ruled a big chunk of Arizona with a delicately gloved fist (wrapped around the riding crop of course). She has a huge spread, an army of ruffians at her disposal, the local law in her pocket and a younger brother who causes nothing but trouble. You know he's a bad seed when he slaps around his beautiful Latina lover for nothing more than disagreeing with him.Her world is challenged by the arrival of a federal marshal with a craggy jaw, a strong moral compass and a nice suit, and his two brothers, who brings law and order, and romantic intrigue to that windswept (and, actually, tornado-swept) corner of the west.There are crooked lawmen, ambushes, fistfights, weddings, funerals, stolen kisses, tumbleweeds, public drinking (and bathing), a strolling minstrel and classic lines – "You seem upset." "I was born upset." Saddle up, this one's a winner.--www.cowboyandvampire.com--

Forty Guns 1957 Directed by Sam Fuller "Forty Guns" is "Johnny Guitar" for heterosexuals. The warning "For French Film Critics Only" should flash on and off over the opening credits. There is practically no character development, mostly because the plot jumps around so fast you can hardly keep track of it. The only thing you're sure of is you don't give a damn about anybody or care how it ends. It must have done great business in France. Oh I forgot, the French public has enough sense not to watch art movies, which only play to audiences at NYU's film school. Barry Sullivan currently has my vote for least charismatic gunfighter to ever appear in a Western (he unseated Yul Brenner). Boy were the sparks flying between him and 50 year old Barbara Stanwyk! Was that whiskey they were drinking, or geritol? Fuller claims Marilyn Monroe wanted to play Stanwyk's part. He should have taken her up on it and gone for pure camp. "Forty Guns" would probably still be selling out midnight shows in the West Village. When Sulllivan goes into his supposedly intimidating "long walk" (a pale ripoff of Robert Mitchum's fantastic scene in 1948's "Blood on the Moon") he looks like Fred MacMurray in "My Three Sons" coming after Chip for the car keys, not a gunfighter playing "chicken" with a henchman. "Forty Guns" did have one positive: it was short. A good thing, since you don't have Joan Crawford's bright red lipstick around to keep you awake. Yeah, yeah, it's one of Martin Scorsese's favorite movies. When are people going to wake up and realize that Scorsese likes a lot of bad movies? "Duel in the Sun" is on his must watch list too, remember? I actually like most of the movies Scorsese makes himself, but even his most ardent fans have to admit that he's a sadistic pervert. Do I have to rattle off the sick, violent scenes he's put in just about every movie he's made? I'm guessing that Marty found a kindred soul in Fuller when he saw the conclusion to "Forty Guns".

"Forty Guns" (1957) is an excellent Western, directed, produced and written by cult director Samuel Fuller, who made such classics as "The Big Red One" (1980) among others. The plot of it is unusual, which is about a powerful rancher, played by Barbara Stanwyck, who rules an Arizona county with her private posse of hired guns. When a new Marshall called Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan) arrives to set things straight, the cattle queen finds herself in love with the avowedly non-violent lawman. Both have itchy-fingered brothers, which ends in some surprising deaths.For a movie made in America during the fifties, when the censors where still in full force, it is quite a violent film with more than your average number of deaths. Interestingly, at one point, the camera focus's only on Sullivan's eye's, in a style not dissimilar from what Leone dd in his Spaghetti Westerns years after. The photography is splendid, with long, long tracking shots and high contrast black and white photography. The script is more than a little odd, but it does the movie no harm, apart from an annoying happy ending.In conclusion, this is a very different Western than from what was being made at the time with a number of hugely enjoyable stylistic touches. A must for all fans of the Western genre.