RETURNING SUNDAY & MONDAY, JULY 26 & 27, 2009
New 35mm Print!
JOHNNY GUITAR

"Nicholas Ray's terse, paradoxical and fascinating 1954 Western"
– Elvis Mitchell, New York Times (Click here to read complete review)

Scebe from JOHNNY GUITAR (1954) “How many men have you forgotten?”
“As many women as you remember.”
In a dusty Arizona town, Joan Crawford’s pants-wearing, guntoting saloon owner (“Down there I sell whiskey and cards. All you can buy up these stairs is a bullet in the head. Now which do you want?”) stands to rake in the dough when the railroad comes through. But when the stage is robbed and a rancher murdered, the townspeople ready a noose for her more-than-friend The Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady), with insanely jealous cattle baroness Mercedes McCambridge (years later the voice of the Devil in The Exorcist) hell-bent on having Crawford join him. Enter Joan’s old flame Sterling Hayden, as the eponymous Johnny, who, despite preferring guitar-play over gun-play — and up against bad guys like Ernest Borgnine and Ward Bond — does what a man’s gotta do. Nick Ray’s baroque, emotionally tormented Western, photographed in “gorgeous Trucolor by Consolidated” (and looking better than ever in this new print), bursts at the seams with sexual tension and anti-McCarthy allegory. American reviewers scratched their heads (British critic Gavin Lambert deemed it one of the silliest films of the year), but it was immediately embraced by the young critics of Cahiers du Cinéma — among them future directors Eric Rohmer (“Ray is the poet of love and violence”), Jean- Luc Godard (“here is something which exists only in the cinema”), and François Truffaut (“dream-like, magical, delirious . . . the Beauty and the Beast of the Western”). High praise indeed for a Republic Pictures oater! “The whole thing is weird, hysterical, and quite unlike anything else in the history of the cowboy film.” – Geoff Andrew, Time Out (London).

A PARAMOUNT RELEASE
NICHOLAS RAY - click here to go to series page