Johnny Guitar

Vienna runs a saloon outside town, waiting for the railroad; when it arrives her land will be worth something. Emma Small, who leads the townspeople, wants her gone and uses a robbery as a pretext to raise a lynch mob. Vienna's old lover Johnny comes back, now carrying a guitar and saying he does not carry a gun. Nicholas Ray directed. Joan Crawford plays Vienna, Mercedes McCambridge plays Emma and Sterling Hayden plays Johnny. At the centre are two women rather than two men, and the hostility between them was real on set. It began when it came out that Crawford had once dated McCambridge's husband, and Crawford resented the attention Ray and the crew gave the younger actress. The break came when the crew applauded McCambridge's scene addressing the posse. Ray later saw a drunk Crawford walking along the highway trailing costumes she had taken from McCambridge's dressing room. McCambridge afterwards called Crawford a mean, tipsy, powerful, rotten-egg lady and said her own career suffered from Crawford's efforts to have her blacklisted. Sterling Hayden's line survived too: there is not enough money in Hollywood to make him work with Joan Crawford again, and he likes money. The politics are not hidden. Both Ray and the screenwriter Philip Yordan acknowledged building the story as a thinly veiled allegory for anti-communist hysteria and the McCarthy witch hunts, and the mob's demand that people name names points straight at it. Who it is for: viewers who like unusual westerns and films where the conflict between two women is the centre. Who it is not for: anyone after a realistic western. The dialogue is artificial on purpose, the colours are pushed, and the film signs no contract with realism.