Johnny Guitar

Let’s begin with my student's criticism of the film as sexist and even perverse. We cannot avoid the issue of sexism in the film because gender is so self-consciously performed by the actors. If we remember that this is 1954 and that this film is not only a western, but a western produced by Republic Studios, then we cannot help but be aware of the western and its masculinist conventions, conventions that this film turns upside down. Republic Studios, headed by Herbert Yates, had been synonymous with westerns since the 1930s. This was the studio of the great series westerns: The Three Mesquiteers (one of whom was John Wayne), Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Allan ‘Rocky’ Lane, William ‘Wild Bill’ Elliott, Rex Allen, and Monte Hale were just some of the most prominent cowboy stars of Republic Studios. Republic was home of the B picture, and JOHNNY GUITAR was meant to be a top of the line B picture. The person familiar with Republic films would expect a conventional western, and JOHNNY GUITAR begins with a standard B western opening motif. Countless of these westerns began with a stagecoach hold-up more often than not thwarted by the hero who rides into the scene from a high vantage point so he can be filmed astride his horse in a heroic pose against he rock and sky. This is precisely what we get in the opening of JOHNNY GUITAR – the hero (or apparent hero) rides high among the rocks; he witnesses a stage hold-up; but he just rides away. He does not interfere in the robbery. He does carry a guitar slung over his back, a detail that invokes the singing cowboy who was so much a part of Republic Studios stable of actors (4 of the cowboys I list above were singing cowboys – Autry, Rogers, Allen, Hale). In other words, the opening sequence of JOHNNY GUITAR invokes the familiar conventions of the B western and even the singing cowboy western, only to turn its back on these conventions. This sequence tells us that we can expect something other than the norm in this film.

Something else in this sequence differs from convention: the blast that sends rock and debris into the air. The blast seems gratuitous here at the beginning, but explosions become one of the motifs in the film. We learn that the railway is coming and that the rail workers are blasting in the vicinity. But we have so little information about this, and the railway workers are completely anonymous (except for the Rhys Williams character whom we see briefly at Vienna’s early in the film) that the blasting serves something other than a plot device. In the plot, the blasting serves to trap the Dancing Kid and his gang in the valley, but, as I say, this is of minimal interest. The blasting communicates throughout the film the passions of the people (Emma, Vienna, Johnny, McIvers, Turkey, Dancing Kid, Lonergan). Something similar works in the opening scenes outside Vienna’s place with the wind howling so loudly that people cannot hear each other, and the dust blowing with hurricane intensity. The message is that we are about to meet people on the verge of blowing up or blowing away (as it were). Their passions may vary, but passion holds sway in this film. Each character waits for some spark to set them off. For Emma this spark is the death of her brother.

Not long after the opening sequence, we meet Vienna who is dressed like a man, all in black. Sam (Robert Osterloh), one of Vienna’s croupiers, looks directly at the camera and tells us that she is more a man than most men. She not only works in a saloon, she own it. She has made her money in ways frowned upon by upright people, but she has survived and even succeeded. And she has an adversary, another woman named Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge). These two women appear to compete for the affections of the Dancing Kid. What this film has done is deliver a western in which the hero and villain are not the male leads, but rather the female leads. The leading man does not even carry a gun for most of the film. And the two leading men remain, on the whole, passive. They react, but never initiate situations. The western is traditionally a film about masculinity and male control of law, justice, money, and business. This film turns all this on its head. Vienna is not only a strong woman, she competes in a man’s world and succeeds in a man’s world. That is, she succeeds until another woman comes along who despises her. Emma Small seems also to run a business, and she runs the men in town too through the force of her demented personality. Now whatever we may think of this overturning of convention, it does challenge the western tradition and ask the audience to rethink its sense of what is appropriate in this genre. As we know, American audiences could not understand such disrespect for the traditional trapping of the western, whereas French critics loved it. Truffault, Rohmer, Godard, and the others loved it. They saw the film as an experiment in form, and as an exercise in visual poetry. They may also have reacted to the film’s ostensibly leftist politics.

But saying that the French liked the film does not say anything about the possible misogyny in the film. The two women are hard cases, and at least one of them is crazy. Vienna (her name invokes Europe, the old world, culture and art – she has a bust of Beethoven in her room above the saloon and she plays a grand piano) spends a significant moment in the film wearing unavoidable white, while her adversary Emma Small wears unavoidable black. Emma, like her name, is small in more than stature. She is jealous and avaricious and mean-spirited. She delights in the burning of Vienna’s place; her reaction is virtually devilish. She is a devil to Vienna’s angel. The film is as diagrammatic as this pairing suggests. Emma represents the savagery of the frontier as opposed to Vienna’s urbanity. We might say that the character of Emma suggests that women are hysterics and need to die (as Emma does), and that the character of Vienna suggests that even a fallen woman may be redeemed by the love of a man and the acceptance of domesticity (the cooking of bacon and eggs for her man at the end of the film). If we say this, then we are saying that the film keeps women in their place and that it is staunchly misogynist in its presentation of women.

But this view may be hasty. Let’s go back to Vienna and her man, Johnny. Vienna wears pants and a gun; she wears pants even when she cooks bacon and eggs. Johnny wears pants and no gun. He carries a guitar. He has traded his weapons of death for the music of life, or something like that. But this is not exactly the case. As events unfold, we learn that Johnny is “gun crazy” – words Vienna uses. The words “gun crazy” invoke a famous ‘noir’ film from the 1940s, Joseph H. Lewis’s GUN CRAZY (1949), a small budget film released through United Artists. GUN CRAZY is about two young people, one of whom (the girl) we first meet while she is dressed as a cowgirl and working as a sharpshooter in a stage act. She and her young lover go on a robbery rampage, much like Bonnie and Clyde. Both the male and the female are gun crazy in Lewis’s film. The point is that Vienna is no gun crazy woman. She fears Johnny’s intense attraction to the gun, and she uses hers only when no other option is available. The colours she wears so prominently might just make the point for me. We first see her dressed in black like a conventional gunfighter. Later we see her in the strikingly white dress, that could serve as a wedding dress. Then she wears an intensely red shirt, and finally a yellow shirt. This last shirt, the yellow shirt, is the same one that Turkey Ralston (Ben Cooper) wore when we first meet him near the beginning of the film. Yellow is the colour of the sun, cowardice perhaps, gold, light and newness. Vienna adorns the yellow shirt with a necktie of red. Here at the end of the film, she combines the colour of passion (life and blood) with the colour of hope and even glory and perhaps non-violence. In this get-up she shoots the black-clad Emma, and then leaves through the cleansing waterfall with her man, Johnny, and embraces him in the final shot of the film. The two of them have been baptized by the water just before they embrace. Clearly the waterfall is am image of cleansing and these two have been cleansed of their pasts, and are about to embark on a future – without guns. To put this another way, I am arguing that Vienna does change her man. She has decried his craze for guns and he has pretty much renounced the gun by the end of the film. The woman’s power is real. This film is not necessarily misogynistic. Quite the reverse. This film celebrates the strength of woman – both for evil (Emma) and for good (Vienna). And Johnny does not leave the film castrated. He is still capable of using his fists, and of saving a life. He saves the Dancing Kid, at least for a few minutes. Finally, Emma puts a bullet in his brain, but Johnny had stopped Bart Lonergan (Ernest Borgnine) from shooting Dancing.

But what of Emma? Emma is, in some ways, the center of the film. She keeps the action going. And she is, as critics have noted, sexually ambiguous. She strokes her little pistol suggestively; she wears a black dress and hat that are reminiscent of a nun’s habit; she wears her hair short; she shoots the man she supposedly loves; and she is excessively jealous of Vienna. Some have suggested that she is a lesbian. This suggestion that Emma is a lesbian or that she is, at the very least, sexually ambiguous, has lead some to contemplate Vienna’s androgynous sexuality and wonder if she too is supposed to be lesbian. After all, she wears pants and carries a gun and has short hair. She also has mask-like make-up – those wide red lips and that contoured face with black arching eyebrows. We might well ask what is going on with the sexuality in this film. One thing for sure, the two women are camp figures. Vienna could be a parody of a man in drag when she wears that white dress. Camp works through exaggeration, and it confuses sexual identity. And this is a film that definitely is about confusion of identity, sexual and otherwise. Johnny has changed his identity by changing his name; Vienna has had several identities in her past; the Dancing Kid hides his real name; Old Tom (John Carradine) is without identity (he is pleased at the moment of his death that he is the center of attention for once in his life). Confusion is the order of the day. The explosions remind us of “queering” in that an explosion mixes things up, tosses things about, and generally makes confusion where once was clarity. And so we might say that the women in this film are queer, and at the same time we can say that the women in this film really are stronger than the men.

But what about those names – Dancing Kid, Johnny Guitar, Turkey, Vienna, Emma Small? If you say Emma and Vienna one after the other really quickly, what do you hear? The homology might be significant. Remember, Vienna (the city) was the home of Freud (the connection is anachronistic and not logical, but nevertheless interesting). This is a film about psychological states (hysteria, jealousy, and passion). Emma and Vienna are doubles – the film is relentlessly schematic (e.g. Vienna’s place/town; black-clad town people/scruffy gang; male/female; Johnny/Dancing; gambling/conniving; inside/outside; railway/stagecoach). But the names carry another resonance – they are close to being silly. At least one other western made around the same time, DUEL AT SILVER CREEK (Don Siegel 1952), makes use of exaggerated naming; we have a cast of characters that includes The Silver Kid, Brown Eyes, Lightning Tyrone, Jane “Dusty” Fargo, Johnny Sombrero, Rat Face Blake, Tinhorn Burgess, and Dan “Pop” Muzik. Imagine a character called Pop Muzik! In both DUEL AT SILVER CREEL and JOHNNY GUITAR dialogue draws attention to names; one character will actually ask what kind of name another character has. We cannot help but contemplate names in these films. These names are parodic, making fun of a tradition of naming in the western in which we have characters such as the ‘Virginian,’ the Ringo Kid, Johnny Ringo, Wild Bill Cody (or Elliott), Hoot Gibson, Kid Cyclone, Lightning Crandall, the Polka Dot Bandit and so on. The names are also baroque, as is the film itself with its excessive colour scheme, sharp angles, false sets, and exaggerated acting. This is, remember, camp. The over-the-top acting and dialogue (“I never shake hands with a left-handed draw.”) at times verge on the Gothic. The scene in which the black-clad men and woman enter Vienna’s place and find her dressed in white playing the piano is a case in point. The piano is set on a raised floor and against a rock backdrop. The shot of Vienna in white at the piano is like something out of Phantom of the Opera. The idea of performance (played out in several ways in the film) is clear here. Vienna is on stage (as she is the first time we see her when she stands above the people in the saloon). The whole film is staged. It is operatic, and we can see how it influences the later Spaghetti Westerns in its close-ups and its lingering shots that dramatize through pace and cutting. The scene in which Tom is shot is an example. We might ask what function this operatic excess serves.

Well, so far we have the parodic function. JOHNNY GUITAR counters and parodies the western tradition in films. Fine. But so what? The Gothic elements might also remind us of the instability of genre, and the instability of gender. Excess leads to instability, and this film is about instability in more than one sense. We have mental instability, especially in Emma Small; we have economic instability in Vienna’s failure to make a success of her saloon; we have instability in the law (the sheriff is ineffectual); we have family instability; we have the very instability of life itself (death is cheap on the frontier); and we have the instability of identiies. To put this idea concerning instability another way, I might say that JOHNNY GUITAR is about the individual trying to establish clarity and solidarity in an unstable environment. Nicholas Ray’s most famous film, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1956), deals with this same theme.

But have we established the importance of the film’s operatic excess? Opera implies spectacle and ritual, and JOHNNY GUITAR is ritualistic. We have actual ritual moments in the film – the dancing in the saloon, the funeral of Emma’s brother, the hanging of Turkey and the almost hanging of Vienna, the moments of confrontation when Emma faces down a crowd of hostile people, and perhaps the questioning of Turkey when Emma and McIvers (Ward Bond) force him to tell a truthful lie, and save himself. This last moment is crucial to the film’s commentary on the HUAC/McCarthy hearings that were in full swing when this film was made. Like a number of other films at the time -- most notably Siegel’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, Zinneman’s HIGH NOON, Dwan’s SILVER LODE, Farrow’s BIG JIM MCCLAIN, and a whole host of Sci Fi films in which aliens stood in for the communists – JOHNNY GUITAT makes a not-too-veiled critique of the McCarthy witch-hunts. The easily lead mob, the innocent victims, the wrecking of home and livelihood – all this went on in American and in Hollywood in the early 50s. In fact, at least one star of JOHNNY GUITAR, Sterling Hayden who plays Johnny, had appeared before the House UnAmercian Activities Committee, and he had named names. The experience devastated him, and he lost interest in his career as an actor, eventually quitting Hollywood completely to live on a boat in perpetual motion. Some viewers think that you can tell how uninterested he is in acting by watching this film. Anyhow, Hayden plays Johnny, a character who has changed his name and tries to put his past behind him. In other words, he plays a man “with a past”; this past connects him with all those who appeared before HUAC and answered the question: “Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?” The scene in which Vienna tells Turkey to “save yourself” draws its strength from the McCarthy inquiries. And we might also remember that Joan Crawford refused to testify against any of her colleagues; she resisted the pressures to name names and identify people. Emma, like Joseph McCarthy, is crazy. Her craziness is a form of paranoia. She forces Turkey to lie in the name of truth because she has convinced herself that Vienna is immoral and disgusting without knowing anything about Vienna. Emma’s viciousness is the viciousness of a person crazed with her own sense of moral outrage, and her desire to see her terrain remain “pure” (critics sometimes refer to Emma as “Puritan”).

But why would Nicholas Ray (who was at one time a member of the Communist Party) choose to make a western in which two women play the roles of hero and villain, and thereby overturn the conventions of the western tradition? In making this anti-McCarthy western with two women in the leads, Ray connects sexual politics with civic or governmental politics. The message may be that the kind of fascistic containment of leftist or radical points of view also works in matters of sexuality. In other words, a society monitors and contains people for their political views and for their sexual preferences and sexual activities. I say that the message “may be” politically charged to champion “otherness” in matters of ideology and sexuality because nothing is entirely clear in this film. And even if this reading of the film as politically “progressive” is accurate, it does not necessarily discount the view that in the end women are put in their place, as adjuncts to male authority. But let’s contemplate the end for a moment. The two women have a gunfight, and Vienna wins, although as convention would have it, she receives a wound in the arm. Emma is shot and rolls pell mell down a hill until she comes to rest face down in a stream. The men who accompanied her have already distanced themselves from her by resolving not to shoot any more. As things wind down and Vienna and her man leave arm in arm, we hear on the soundtrack a song sung in a female voice (Peggy Lee, of all people – she of “You give me fever/Fever when you hold me tight.”). The first thing for us to note is that in westerns the songs on the soundtracks are usually sung by men (cf THE SEARCHERS), and usually we hear them over the beginning credits. Here the song comes only at the end and we hear it sung by a woman. The words to the song refer to “my Johnny.” We might say that the woman in this film gets her Johnny, as it were. I am thinking of a hooker and her John, of course, and we can remember what profession Vienna practiced before she became the owner of a saloon. Might we not think that Vienna will maintain some measure of control over Johnny, the way she has controlled most of the other men in her life to get her to where she is? Do we have to see this as a sexist or misogynist film?