Forty Guns (1957)

Great Film overall

Excellent but underrated film

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

This movie is a bizarre western that works, filmed like a Gothic horror film, it sets a pace for action that is brisk and unapologetic. The cavalier personalities of the main characters seem like an odd fit with the rest of the brooding characters. Dean Jagger gives a fine performance as the love struck dupe who thinks that a way to Stanwyck's heart is by being a groveling yes man and cuckold. A friend told me that the intent was to make Stanwyck's brother, her illegitimate son, and I think the strangeness of their relationship would have been less creepy had it been written that way. The way it stands there is a bit of over the top emotional attachment that is on the fringe of a husband and wife relationship.That being said, the scene where Stanwyck's is at the burnt remnants of her childhood home is sheer artistry, and visually arresting. To sum it up, the sheer weirdness and bizarre dialogue, along with the writing of the story, added with some truly unexpected twists make this a film worth viewing.

Aided by her trigger-happy brother and a small army, a cattle queen owns the county including the sheriff. But there's trouble when a marshal arrives who has a trigger-happy brother of his own. Thus a load of complications ensue.Interesting, if not wholly successful, western. There's really too many principal characters and plot for the limited time frame (79-min's.). Nonetheless, director and screenwriter Fuller manage a few real surprises. Then too, this may be the "walkingest" horse opera I've seen – note how many tracking shots Fuller manages of people walking. This may be a budget consideration since little action occurs away from town. The forty guns are forty guys riding behind queen bee Jessica (Stanwyck) like a mounted army. Oddly, these guys never talk even after being dismissed from the extra-long dinner table, and soon disappear when Jessica's little empire crumbles. There are a lot of cross-currents to the highly involved plot line, so you may need the proverbial scorecard to keep up.Unsurprisingly, Stanwyck is imperious as the big cheese running both her ranch and the town, while Sullivan is appropriately steely-eyed as the town tamer. But give John Ericson (Brockie) an upside-down Oscar for the worst over-the-top mugging since The Three Stooges. At the same time, Jagger does well as the spineless Sheriff in the employ of queen bee Jessica. Fuller shows real style at times. He certainly knows how to subvert western cliché and keep audience interest. However, in my little book, this is not one of his better films, basically because of a crowded script and budgetary limitations. I mean a lot of money went into the name cast that perhaps had to be made up elsewhere as in the pedestrian settings. All in all, it's, a rather exotic if not exactly memorable western.

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 (1957)Sam Fuller's style is uncompromising and over the top. He pushes both melodrama and visual drama. And he's also extremely astute handling the actors and the space and light they move through. His movies are definitely experiences, from "The Naked Kiss" to "The Big Red One" all the way back to the masterpiece, "Pickup on South Street."And he usually tells a strong clear story. That's the big weakness here. It's as if all the over-sized elements, including Barbara Stanwyck as this unlikely woman power queen frontier figure with forty men at her beck and call, are juggled around enough to keep it interesting just on their own. Not only will the progress of events be sometimes confusing, it will at times also be too unlikely to hold water, which is even worse.Not that the movie isn't a thrill to watch. I mean watch, with your eyes. The sparkling widescreen photography is so good, so very good and original, you can't help but like that part of it. In a way that's sustaining--it's what kept me glued. But that's my thing. I'm a photographer. I love the physical structure of movies. This movie was made for me. It's made to be studied.And that's what "Forty Guns" is famous for, an over-sized influence. The French writers of the time (like Godard) and some later American upstarts (like Tarantino) have praised the filmmaking, if not always the film. You can certainly see, and appreciate, how much a movie like this foreshadowed the spaghetti westerns which have become so famous, but which were made six and more years later.And that's worth remembering, too. Westerns, as a genre, are well worn by now. The themes have been worked and overworked. To make a new fresh western means pushing it to some limit, and for Fuller that means a soap opera exaggeration. That means galloping horses endlessly around a waiting stagecoach as the horses jump in fear. That means a man walking up to his rival and walking and walking, far longer than it would take to cover the hundred yards shown, until reaching him and punching, not shooting him. It means a final glorious scene that is shown farther and farther in the distance and all you see are two little dots as figures--and yet you know what just happened, and how satisfying that is.And how unreasonable the events were getting us to that point. "Forty Guns" plays loose with archetypes in a pre-post-modern way that has made it weirdly contemporary. Fuller's films, like his unlikely contemporary Douglas Sirk's, have taken on a life of their own, as flawed as they are. This may not be the best place to start to love his work, but it's a good place to start to understand where movies had gotten to--some would say fallen--by the late 1950s. Check it out.