Forty Guns

Barbara Stanwyck in Forty Guns (dir. Samuel Fuller, 1957).



Gene Barry, Robert Dix, and Barry Sullivan.



Sandra Wirth.

Barbara Stanwyck's role in Forty Guns is in some ways similar to the part she played a few years earlier in Anthony Mann's The Furies: a gutsy frontier matriarch who rules her ranch with an iron (albeit nicely manicured) hand. In both films, she's the core of emotional energy--her presence is inimitably, passionately electric. She vies compellingly with Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar for the distinction of ultimate western dragon lady.

The plot here is almost shapeless. It's been about a month now since I watched it, and I couldn't tell you the storyline if my life depended on it. What I remember is Fuller's riveting staging, and the overall mood of psychological wryness translated into kinetic strings of sexually charged code-images. If Hitchcock had ever done a western, it might have resembled this, at least visually. (Wow--don't you wish Hitchcock had done a western?)

The Baron of Arizona

Vincent Price in The Baron of Arizona (dir. Samuel Fuller, 1950).

Loosely fact-based story of James Reavis, the brazen swindler who faked centuries-old Spanish documents bequeathing the entire Arizona territory to a woman he groomed from childhood to this purpose, finally marrying her in order to obtain the title of "Baron of Arizona" for himself. Vincent Price pitches his performance just right: he's shifty, hypocritical, a cad--but eminently smooth in a way that hints at deeper strengths of character.

This is Samuel Fuller at his most cinematically conservative--the camera work and editing are reserved, efficient, and quietly elegant. The most audacious visual is the set for Reavis's office, with its bold, stylized full-wall map of Arizona behind the desk. Reed Hadley makes a good foil for Price as John Griff, the government forgery specialist who smells a rat, and Margia Dean (one of my favorite midcentury bit-players) has a charming moment as a gulled Marquesa.

I Shot Jesse James

Reed Hadley (straightening the picture) and John Ireland (firing the gun and remembering firing the gun) in I Shot Jesse James (dir. Samuel Fuller, 1949).

Sam Fuller's directorial debut, shot in ten days. John Ireland's portrayal of "the coward Robert Ford" is nicely modulated, so that it's never too obvious how we're supposed to feel about him. (Fuller went on record as saying that he wanted to puncture the myth of James as a hero, but this seems odd considering Reed Hadley's performance of the famous outlaw: he comes off as almost saintly in his Abraham-Lincoln-style beard and his quiet, generous demeanor as a family man.) The love triangle plot with Ireland, Preston Foster, and Barbara Britton is slight in itself, but provides an affectingly lyric counterpoint to the balladistic thrust of the main narrative, and the shifting of the action halfway through from Missouri to the silver mines of Colorado feels like a graceful structural stroke. The true hight point of the film, however, must be when Ford enters a saloon and encounters a wandering troubadour (Robin Short) who unknowingly begins singing "The Ballad of Jesse James" to him. When the singer realizes his gaffe but Ford insists that he go on singing, the tension of embarrassment and fear is excruciating.