For instance, we watch Joan Crawford, in a white dress, playing the piano in a cavernous saloon, with a candlestick and a pistol beside her. If Alt Screen had a golden rule, it would be: never miss a chance to see Johnny Guitar in all its gobsmacking glory on the big screen. Ray’s baroque and eccentric western is surely one of the most rigorously aestheticized movies ever to come out of mainstream (more or less) Hollywood. In remaining ambiguous, the film leaves not only its notions of sexuality up for debate, but also its commentary on isolation.ĭoes it come at all as a surprise that the first image in the often-hallucinatory Johnny Guitar features an explosion, and one whose cause is not immediately apparent? As Geoff Andrew, in his indispensible extended analysis of Raya€™s career, usefully reminds us: a€?Tension a€“ a sense of things being so out of balance, so unstable, so fragile, that the whole edifice of a personality, a relationship or a society will fall apart a€“ is virtually a sine qua non of Raya€™s worka€? (1).
The viewers who stayed away from Raya€™s a€?Johnny Guitar,a€? say, didna€™t know what they were missing.The French were right to honor the convulsive strangeness of a€?Johnny Guitara€? (1954), the tale of a saloonkeeper (Joan Crawford) fighting, with the aid of an old flame (Sterling Hayden), to survive a lynch mob.
Joan Crawford, arms akimbo, stars as the saloon owner and potential empire builder Vienna, and you have to love the movie for that reason alone. Nota bene, Clearview discounts their ticket price for Chelsea Classics screenings: you pay just $7.50!