Love the edit that has Barbara Stanwyck (in Mercede's role) playing opposite Joan Crawford. What a film it would have been, had it been cast thst way! Great analysis.
Wow. I clicked on this video somewhat hesitantly due to how many times I've been burnt by cinema video essays here on UA-cam. Usually, the videomaker has very little knowledge about film theory or history. They also regularly misuse common terms making their lines of inquiry completely incomprehensible. This is a well researched and well edited video that presents a series of compelling arguments along with a true wealth of interesting and relevant clips. This is even better than many video essays I've seen on discs from Criterion, MoC, Arrow, etc. Johnny Guitar is my favorite Western and quite possibly my all-time favorite film. You've truly done it justice here. Very good work!
Heard this song last year for the first time in New Vegas with all the DLC on Steam, best late birthday gift ever! Fell in love with the song, then heard this was a movie, now seeing this video. Excellent job with this topic! So watching Johnny Guitar, and reading the book!
Brilliant video! Your encyclopedic knowledge of the history of westerns reminds me of the films of critic Mark Cousins who also made a 14 hour long film essay about women in film (although more from the point of views of women of directors) called Women Make Film. Thinking back to Lee Clark Mitchell’s theory on westerns and masculinity, it reminded me of something Godard said in Histoire(s) du Cinéma. He goes even further saying that masculinity and by extension misogyny is ingrained in the cinematographic form of westerns with a simple of example of how framing conventions worked in the genre: Men were shown from the knee up so their guns are always in frame symbolically a phallic extension while women were framed from the chest up to show their breasts. It’s no wonder he was such an admirer of Ray and Johnny Guitar to a point where I think it might be the film he has referenced the most throughout his career from Pierrot le Fou (even before I think) all the way to The Image Book 2 years ago.
Thanks for the comment! That's a really interesting point from Godard. I have yet to see Histoire(s) du Cinéma, but will try and do so as soon as i have four and a half hours to spare! There's a part two to the video if you are interested: ua-cam.com/video/hQ661aoKG60/v-deo.html
Weird and hysterical Johnny Guitar is a Western with Freudian touches, its dreamlike with much emotionalism and it contains magnificent dialogue which is blended with domination and humiliation culminating in a deadly confrontation the results are both fascinating and melodramatic. There is a sequence in Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar where the lawmen all wear black. These are supposedly “respectable citizens” who try to defend their land from the arrival of the Eastern people and the railroad. They are all men, all except one, Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge). She is their ringleader. She wears a dress, but it’s all black, too, and its very somber and she has a pistol under her belt. Joan Crawford represents the threat. She is Vienna, a self-made woman, the owner of a saloon in the outskirts of the small Old West town, waiting to cash in because the railroad will pass right through her property. In this particular scene, Vienna is wearing a pure white ruffled gown and she is playing the piano against an orange stone wall. The visual composition of this scene, alternating between Crawford all dressed in pure white and that assembly of human hypocrisy in head-to-toe black, is astonishing and even more striking than the vivid, painted colors (the reds, yellows and blues) used by Nicholas Ray throughout the entire film was filmed in Trucolor. Johnny Guitar is a color Western Noir, and this is just one of the elements that contribute to its uniqueness, and also why that black and white costumes sequence are so haunting. Nicholas Ray, one of the pioneer independent American filmmakers, broke down the rigid barriers of the Western genre, not just in the extreme style of the film, but also in reversing the color coding and especially genre archetypes, one of the very first films that did that (and to a greater extent than director Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1954, RKO Radio), starring Marlene Dietrich, or Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns (1957, 20th Century Fox), starring Barbara Stanwyck). In Johnny Guitar, the women - Vienna (Joan Crawford), and Emma (Mercedes McCambridge)- assume roles previously exclusively reserved for the men, while men are a little more than mere objects of desire for the two women. We first see Vienna atop a staircase, dressed in a black buttoned up shirt, black trousers and black leather boots. She soon points the gun to the same group that would later return wearing black (the men of the town and Emma, or better said Emma and her posse of cowboys and lackeys whom she easily dominates). They burst into Vienna’s saloon and home, trying to put the blame of a stagecoach robbery on her. Vienna is prepared to defend herself and her property at all costs. Crawford’s bigger than life star persona and her steely look suited this raw, man’s-world role, and her red lipstick seems to be the only thread of femininity left - “I never met a woman who was more a man,” observes one of her bartenders talking to her former lover, Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden). It is not however, because the delicate all-white dress worn later in the film in that visually staggering sequence shows she still holds on to her feminine sensitivity. Crawford is magnificent in her role. Strong, mannish, gun-slinging, shrewd and unapologetic about her choices and her past, she builds her character from the ground up and yet she doesn’t let you all in. She is void of sentimentality and feminine stereotypes. It’s more than a defensive mechanism, one that is closely linked to a past love and which re-enters her life, Johnny Guitar. It’s living life by her own rules. “A man can lie, steal, and even kill, but as long as he hangs onto his pride, he’s still a man,” she tells Sterling Hayden’s Johnny, piercing him with her stark black eyes. “All a woman has to do is slip once and she’s a tramp.” Actress Mercedes McCambridge's greatest moment in the entire film, takes place just after the last showdown in Vienna’s saloon; as Vienna is taken away on a horse alongside Turkey, her gallant young would-be protector, Emma doubles back and re-enters the empty saloon, rifle in hand. She takes aim and fires at the chandelier hanging from the ceiling, which falls, instantly setting the building ablaze. You then see McCambridge’s body language as the fire spreads: she raises her arms as if conducting it, gazing on it with both awe and pride, as if she can’t believe what she’s done and is rapturous about it. By the time she dances out through the swinging doors, pressing her hand to her mouth in disbelief, and turns to face the camera, the look in her eyes is almost orgasmic with a demented thrill of destruction. Vienna has another male suitor, Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady), who is also the object of interest for the other female protagonist, Emma. “He makes her feel like a woman and that scares her,” Vienna says about Emma and Dancin’ Kid. It’s in fact Vienna’s freedom and independence, experienced as a woman, that Emma is lusting. Nicholas Ray’s film is so twisted, and unconventional, and operatic, and political and ahead of its time (with a counter-culture and women’s liberation subtext), and cinematic, and mythical, all in one, that I have to quote François Truffaut’s ode to it: “It is dreamed, a fairy tale, a hallucinatory Western”, “the Beauty and the Beast of Westerns, a Western dream”. He concluded: “Anyone who rejects Johnny Guitar should never go to the movies again, never see any more films. Such people will never recognize inspiration, poetic intuition, or a framed picture, a shot, an idea, a good film, or even cinema itself.”
Nicely done! It helps explain my Lost Cowboy theory regarding the domestic terrorism that's pandemic in America amid our overabundance of angry white men. I was surprised that you only touched on Yvonne DeCarlo who did a couple of raunchy westerns before becoming the subservient Lily Munster on a now syndicated sitcom. Of particular noteworthiness is Frontier Gal with Rod Cameron. 🤠
That clip from breathless is mistranslated. He asks Joan about the horoscopes, she says “what’s ‘l’horoscope’” and then he replies “I couldn’t find the horoscope” when he hands it back to her. LOL
Love the edit that has Barbara Stanwyck (in Mercede's role) playing opposite Joan Crawford. What a film it would have been, had it been cast thst way!
Great analysis.
Wow. I clicked on this video somewhat hesitantly due to how many times I've been burnt by cinema video essays here on UA-cam. Usually, the videomaker has very little knowledge about film theory or history. They also regularly misuse common terms making their lines of inquiry completely incomprehensible.
This is a well researched and well edited video that presents a series of compelling arguments along with a true wealth of interesting and relevant clips. This is even better than many video essays I've seen on discs from Criterion, MoC, Arrow, etc. Johnny Guitar is my favorite Western and quite possibly my all-time favorite film. You've truly done it justice here.
Very good work!
Couldn't agree more!
Thank you very much! If you are interested here's a second video I did on Johnny Guitar: ua-cam.com/video/hQ661aoKG60/v-deo.html
Great western One of the best! I’M from São Paulo-Brazil and member of the Cineclube dos Amigos do Western!
Johnny Guitar is one of my favourite films and I really enjoyed this take on it.
The blues singer is waaaaay better than this movie
Heard this song last year for the first time in New Vegas with all the DLC on Steam, best late birthday gift ever! Fell in love with the song, then heard this was a movie, now seeing this video. Excellent job with this topic! So watching Johnny Guitar, and reading the book!
This is brilliant. Made me watch Johnny Guitar. She is my style icon now.
Brilliant video! Your encyclopedic knowledge of the history of westerns reminds me of the films of critic Mark Cousins who also made a 14 hour long film essay about women in film (although more from the point of views of women of directors) called Women Make Film. Thinking back to Lee Clark Mitchell’s theory on westerns and masculinity, it reminded me of something Godard said in Histoire(s) du Cinéma. He goes even further saying that masculinity and by extension misogyny is ingrained in the cinematographic form of westerns with a simple of example of how framing conventions worked in the genre: Men were shown from the knee up so their guns are always in frame symbolically a phallic extension while women were framed from the chest up to show their breasts. It’s no wonder he was such an admirer of Ray and Johnny Guitar to a point where I think it might be the film he has referenced the most throughout his career from Pierrot le Fou (even before I think) all the way to The Image Book 2 years ago.
Thanks for the comment! That's a really interesting point from Godard. I have yet to see Histoire(s) du Cinéma, but will try and do so as soon as i have four and a half hours to spare!
There's a part two to the video if you are interested: ua-cam.com/video/hQ661aoKG60/v-deo.html
Wow - This was amazing. Thank you! I got here via Eureka's MOC blu ray announcement for Johnny Guitar.
Great video, Joan would be proud 😄 I loved all the obscure examples. Looking forward to the next one!
P.S. The Wes Anderson bit was hilarious
This is the fantastic video essay that got me to watch Johnny Guitar!!
Weird and hysterical Johnny Guitar is a Western with Freudian touches, its dreamlike with much emotionalism and it contains magnificent dialogue which is blended with domination and humiliation culminating in a deadly confrontation the results are both fascinating and melodramatic. There is a sequence in Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar where the lawmen all wear black. These are supposedly “respectable citizens” who try to defend their land from the arrival of the Eastern people and the railroad. They are all men, all except one, Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge). She is their ringleader. She wears a dress, but it’s all black, too, and its very somber and she has a pistol under her belt. Joan Crawford represents the threat. She is Vienna, a self-made woman, the owner of a saloon in the outskirts of the small Old West town, waiting to cash in because the railroad will pass right through her property. In this particular scene, Vienna is wearing a pure white ruffled gown and she is playing the piano against an orange stone wall. The visual composition of this scene, alternating between Crawford all dressed in pure white and that assembly of human hypocrisy in head-to-toe black, is astonishing and even more striking than the vivid, painted colors (the reds, yellows and blues) used by Nicholas Ray throughout the entire film was filmed in Trucolor.
Johnny Guitar is a color Western Noir, and this is just one of the elements that contribute to its uniqueness, and also why that black and white costumes sequence are so haunting. Nicholas Ray, one of the pioneer independent American filmmakers, broke down the rigid barriers of the Western genre, not just in the extreme style of the film, but also in reversing the color coding and especially genre archetypes, one of the very first films that did that (and to a greater extent than director Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1954, RKO Radio), starring Marlene Dietrich, or Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns (1957, 20th Century Fox), starring Barbara Stanwyck). In Johnny Guitar, the women - Vienna (Joan Crawford), and Emma (Mercedes McCambridge)- assume roles previously exclusively reserved for the men, while men are a little more than mere objects of desire for the two women.
We first see Vienna atop a staircase, dressed in a black buttoned up shirt, black trousers and black leather boots. She soon points the gun to the same group that would later return wearing black (the men of the town and Emma, or better said Emma and her posse of cowboys and lackeys whom she easily dominates). They burst into Vienna’s saloon and home, trying to put the blame of a stagecoach robbery on her. Vienna is prepared to defend herself and her property at all costs. Crawford’s bigger than life star persona and her steely look suited this raw, man’s-world role, and her red lipstick seems to be the only thread of femininity left - “I never met a woman who was more a man,” observes one of her bartenders talking to her former lover, Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden). It is not however, because the delicate all-white dress worn later in the film in that visually staggering sequence shows she still holds on to her feminine sensitivity.
Crawford is magnificent in her role. Strong, mannish, gun-slinging, shrewd and unapologetic about her choices and her past, she builds her character from the ground up and yet she doesn’t let you all in. She is void of sentimentality and feminine stereotypes. It’s more than a defensive mechanism, one that is closely linked to a past love and which re-enters her life, Johnny Guitar. It’s living life by her own rules. “A man can lie, steal, and even kill, but as long as he hangs onto his pride, he’s still a man,” she tells Sterling Hayden’s Johnny, piercing him with her stark black eyes. “All a woman has to do is slip once and she’s a tramp.”
Actress Mercedes McCambridge's greatest moment in the entire film, takes place just after the last showdown in Vienna’s saloon; as Vienna is taken away on a horse alongside Turkey, her gallant young would-be protector, Emma doubles back and re-enters the empty saloon, rifle in hand. She takes aim and fires at the chandelier hanging from the ceiling, which falls, instantly setting the building ablaze. You then see McCambridge’s body language as the fire spreads: she raises her arms as if conducting it, gazing on it with both awe and pride, as if she can’t believe what she’s done and is rapturous about it. By the time she dances out through the swinging doors, pressing her hand to her mouth in disbelief, and turns to face the camera, the look in her eyes is almost orgasmic with a demented thrill of destruction.
Vienna has another male suitor, Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady), who is also the object of interest for the other female protagonist, Emma. “He makes her feel like a woman and that scares her,” Vienna says about Emma and Dancin’ Kid. It’s in fact Vienna’s freedom and independence, experienced as a woman, that Emma is lusting.
Nicholas Ray’s film is so twisted, and unconventional, and operatic, and political and ahead of its time (with a counter-culture and women’s liberation subtext), and cinematic, and mythical, all in one, that I have to quote François Truffaut’s ode to it: “It is dreamed, a fairy tale, a hallucinatory Western”, “the Beauty and the Beast of Westerns, a Western dream”. He concluded: “Anyone who rejects Johnny Guitar should never go to the movies again, never see any more films. Such people will never recognize inspiration, poetic intuition, or a framed picture, a shot, an idea, a good film, or even cinema itself.”
very informative and entertaining video! Well done!
Super interesting and so thoroughly researched.
What an interesting and excellent video this was! Joan Crawford would have loved it!
this was an EXCELLENT vid, thank u!
I heard johnny guitar while playing New Vegas.I think ima see this movie
You are refreshing
Nicely done! It helps explain my Lost Cowboy theory regarding the domestic terrorism that's pandemic in America amid our overabundance of angry white men. I was surprised that you only touched on Yvonne DeCarlo who did a couple of raunchy westerns before becoming the subservient Lily Munster on a now syndicated sitcom. Of particular noteworthiness is Frontier Gal with Rod Cameron. 🤠
Brilliant analysys of my since-long-time cult movie Johnny Guitar... Now I want to see hellfire I never heard about.
Wish you could make an audio commentary for this film, honestly
That clip from breathless is mistranslated. He asks Joan about the horoscopes, she says “what’s ‘l’horoscope’” and then he replies “I couldn’t find the horoscope” when he hands it back to her. LOL
8:17
One more thing...Joan's androgynous picture next to the title "Johnny Guitar", subliminally identifies her as Johnny. Just sayin'.
This is a great movie if one doesn't needlessly get hung up on all the "feminist" bullshit.
It ain't never gonna stop... oh well