Excellent but underrated film

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Barbara Stanwyck (hard as nails) plays a powerful rancher with political ties near Tombstone whose hired hands, mostly crooked and lead by her own brother, bring her together with Barry Sullivan of the U.S. Attorney General's office, out to arrest one of her boys for robbery. Surprisingly brutal and adult western from Globe Enterprises and distributed by Twentieth Century-Fox, written and directed by Samuel Fuller as if he were trying to find a place for every western cliché in the filmmaker's manual. Joseph Biroc's moody black-and-white cinematography gives the proceedings an intensity that elevates the script, even as Fuller's staging--particularly the gun-blazing confrontations--typically run the gamut from florid to outrageous. Sullivan is sturdy (and colorless) as usual; Stanwyck has this type of role down pat. **1/2 from ****

Released in 1957, "Forty Guns" is a B&W Western that revolves around an authoritarian rancher, Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck), who rules an Arizona county with her private entourage of hired guns. When two marshal brothers arrive to set things aright (Barry Sullivan and Gene Barry), the cattle queen finds herself falling for the former. Both have young brothers who are problematic. Eve Brent plays a curvy gun-maker.The movie has a number of positives: The opening sequence is great with its apocalypse of thundering horses led by Jessica on a lone white horse (symbolically?).The tornado sequence is well-done with Jessica getting dragged by her horse and her subsequent monologue after the storm, hooking up with Griff (Sullivan).Eastwood's renowned "Unforgiven" (1992) was obviously influenced by "Forty Guns": Both feature a remote town without justice or law and order, an existential wasteland. Crooked, murderous Sheriff Logan (Dean Jagger), embodying the breakdown of social order, is similar to Hackman in "Unforgiven"; and his suicide is very eerily done. A blind marshal (Worden) is a literal joke on "blind justice" and another symbol of the impotence of law & order.The long shoot-up of the town by the "wet-nose" Brock is grand mayhem. In "Unforgiven" the attack on the prostitute by two young cowboys (also referred to as "boys") serves as the same type of initial, youthful, anarchic transgression which has to be set straight.A gruesome, dressed-up corpse in a coffin, put on full display on the main street, with accompanying, hand-written vindictive placards, is also seen in "Unforgiven." In each it's a grotesque slap to decency and civilization.The town ambush of Griff by Charlie Savage (fitting name) next to a row of empty coffins is effective, particularly the straight-up vertical shot of the window with the assassin's rifle sticking out.While the "Woman with a Whip" song is dated, ill-fitting and corny, the score is otherwise suited to the content.The stylish, irreverent way the movie strays from Western tradition reveals it to be the precursor to the (mostly lame) spaghetti Westerns of the 60s.Other highlights include: The shot of Wes's widow in black against the sky; the leitmotifs of the foal and hearse, representing the extremes of birth and death; the comedy at the baths; the sexy female gunsmith seen through a rifle barrel, a jarring juxtaposition of the feminine and force, as is the case with Jessica.Because of these positives "Forty Guns" is often touted as a groundbreaking Western. While true, it's also a decidedly average 50's Western filled with unbelievable dialogue/characterizations and deliberately contrived scenes, not to mention the story's just dull and it's shot in B&W. Just because it strays from the mold of traditional Westerns doesn't make it a good movie.The film runs 79 minutes and was shot in Arizona.GRADE: C

In 1957 western Forty Guns, Sam Fuller crams an awful lot into an 80 minute runtime; indeed a film whose runtime is double that of its titular digit and whose substance still manages to outweigh some of our more contemporary star dominated genre pictures that are twice, or even three, times as long. The film is a character piece above all else; a film depicting love coming to a zone dominated by hate, a film depicting the changing of a guard where previously a seemingly unmovable, long standing patriarchy was only ever in force and a film depicting relationships with a bit of sustenance to them where previously there were minions doing dirty work and uneasy sibling allegiances.The film will open with a sweet tracking shot, it will end with a bitter-sweet final composition as two people appear to ride off together – during the middle section, pain; affection and most things in-between bitter and sweet will play out between a handful of people in an Old West town of way-back-when. It is a charming film, a short; sharp; brisk Western made by someone between producing the likes of Pickup on South Street and The Big Red One – a film with the scope and visual flair of the latter, but with the ground out, potentially violent, B-movie feel of the former. And then there is that opening, a wondrous series of cuts and compositions depicting a number of riders hurtling towards a seemingly random horse and cart plodding along on this open, barren plain under the hot sun of the American frontier. In the wagon sit the Bonnell brothers: Wes, Chico and Griff – towards them thunder the titular forty guns, a twice-score of men whose immediate presence strikes us as potentially dangerous but whose presence in the film in relation to these three men will only remain as potentially dangerous out of the actions of its leader.And then there is that leader: a woman, a female character whose presence even appears to startle the camera itself in her reveal – a mixture of surprise and allure as we focus on this distinct, black-clad figure atop a white horse dominating the scene and in charge of those, it appears, who follow her. She is Barbara Stanwyck's Jessica Drummond, a land owner but tyrant to those in the locale around her; someone who comes equipped with a hot headed brother who'll rear up later on with its own problems. If there was a protagonist, it would be amongst the three brothers and lie with that of Griff (Sullivan); a lawman whose seen things, and most likely done things, in the past of which he isn't proud although now works on the straight and narrow. He is a man here for one of Drummond's own forty guns, for they committed a felony and must now be taken away so as to be brought to justice.Things are not that easy, and Drummond gets in the way of business. The idea of being with Drummond occurs to Griff for the first time during a public bath set sequence, a scene wherein the character is spoken about as being this indomitable, untameable person – the character even lending time to forge a meek song in her honour. It is later God himself who has to interject in order to force some sort of a tryst between the two, when Drummond finds herself caught in a natural disaster and Griff is there to remedy the situation. Away from the central tract lies the tale of Drummond's aforementioned brother Brockie (Ericson); a man with a violent streak who upsets the elements and causes havoc in the nearby town when the chief law enforcer is killed. Meanwhile, the second of those three Bonnell brothers, in Wes (Barry), strikes up their own relationship with local girl Louvenie – this is before later coming to undertake the role of this now vacant position as a law enforcer.Ultimately, the film's more interesting strand involves its trump card Drummond and its brooding lead Griff, whose nature and set of characteristics, as we witness him essentially 'go up against' Drummond, has us think that if anyone was ever change Drummond, it may very well be him. Where these two sets of factions meet in the opening scene, as if coming face to face with one another in a 'head on' fashion, Fuller's film is effectively a depiction of each group of persons respective disintegration: Griff and his brothers as these people who arrive in the land looking for someone but end up finding something else and 'The Guns' as a group of people enjoying their power and accepting it at the bereft of a female leader who take against her beginning to put other men before them. We enjoy our time with these people and we enjoy Fuller's direction, particularly how he manages to shift from this potentially aggressive relationship between Bonnell and Drummond and back again. In fact, we come to enjoy most of what's in Forty Guns.

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.