Forty Guns

Black and white, 35 mm
USA, 1957, 79 min
Section: Tribute to Samuel Fuller

Synopsis

"I wanted Forty Guns to be a different kind of Western, as good as the trail-blazing movies that had inspired me: King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun, Anthony Mann’s The Furies, and Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar,” Fuller modestly comments about his equally daring attack on the stylistic and narrative rules of a genre considered as sacred in the USA as the family silver. On their way to California, a former sheriff and renowned gun named Griff (Barry Sullivan) and his two brothers wind up in Dodge where they find themselves on the wrong side of rancher Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck) and her forty hired men. The anger Griff incurs from the imperious woman after forcefully pacifying her violent younger brother Brock gradually changes into affection, and Griff returns it. But Brock’s wounded pride provokes the men to once again take up arms and the results are deadly. Fuller’s subversive tinkering with the mythology of the Western (a gunfighter traumatized by guns, the sacred attributes of the genre referenced by ironic sexual innuendos) and the punchy visuals (the radical use of close-ups next to long tracking shots that are now legendary) met with enthusiastic acceptance mainly among European critics and directors (Godard, Leone).