★★★★☆
What must they have thought of Joan Crawford in 1954, with her sharp, black tailored trousers and gun holster, her arched eyebrows, her deadly matt-red lipstick and a stare that would shrivel a cowboy’s manhood at 100 yards?
It all just screams gothic lesbian crush to me, but Crawford played it straight as a die as the saloon and gambling joint owner Vienna in Nicolas Ray’s cult western, set in frontier Arizona. “I never met a woman who was more man,” says Vienna’s bartender, with deep admiration for his boss.
What a strange, stylised film this is, with its lurid colours and deep shadows, and vicious rivalry between two women in the foreground. It confounds every expectation as Crawford battles the slings and arrows of the bitchy Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge), who is the town’s banker as well as her supposed rival in love for the Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady).
The titular Johnny “Guitar” Logan is played by Sterling Hayden, but the women are the catalysts for the action, and there’s plenty of that: a bank heist, a lynching, a posse on the hunt for outlaws. Meanwhile, repressed passion brews.
The plot makes very little sense, as a rival gang backing Emma tries to run Vienna out of town before the railroad arrives and makes everyone rich. Supposedly the unfair hounding of Vienna referenced the McCarthyism of America at the time, but there are other, more fascinating undercurrents here.
Nicholas Ray, PG, 110min
The 4K restoration is in the Ride Lonesome: the Psychological Western season at the BFI Southbank, London, from tonight