FORTY GUNS on DVD, Western, Barbara Stanwyck, Barry Sullivan

An authoritarian rancher, Barbara Stanwyck, who rules an Arizona county with her private posse of hired guns. After a new marshal arrives to set things straight, the cattle queen finds herself falling, brutally for the avowedly non-violent lawman. Both have itchy-fingered brothers, a female gun maker enters the picture, and things go desperately wrong.

STARS: Barbara Stanwyck, Barry Sullivan, Dean Jagger

80 min | Western | 1957 | Color

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One of the greatest westerns ever made.
One of the strangest, and also one of the greatest, westerns ever made, Samuel Fuller's masterpiece "Forty Guns" has all the tropes of a conventional western but subverts them almost as wildly and as blatantly as Mel Brooks did in "Blazing Saddles", the difference being Fuller's movie has all the beauty of a great western as well as a degree of psychological depth unusual even in the late fifties. It also has Barbara Stanwyck in one of her greatest performances. If Joan Crawford came across as a camp icon in "Johnny Guitar", Stanwyck is the very personification of female sexuality, right up there with her performance as Phyllis Dietrichson.

Of course, she also wears the trousers on the Drummond ranch, commanding her forty guns and riding roughshod over what local law and order there is. That's mainly in the form of Dean Jagger's weak-willed sheriff who has the hots for Stanwyck and Jagger is magnificent in the role. The male lead is Barry Sullivan, (very good here), as the bounty hunter out to arrest one of those forty guns and falling foul of Stanwyck's vicious, rebellious younger brother, John Ericson, while falling in love with big sister at the same time. Naturally, this being a Samuel Fuller film, there's quite an emphasis on, shall we say, the more Freudian side of violence; the phallic nature of guns, Stanwyck's ability with a whip etc. and while it stops short of suggesting anything incestuous between Stanwyck and Ericson, their relationship is certainly on the passionate side. Not a great success at the time, it's now considered one of the definitive cult movies.