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Johnny Guitar

1954

Nicholas Ray

Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Scott Brady, Mercedes McCambridge ...

7.8

14,164

Western. Drama Vienna has built a saloon outside of town, and she hopes to build her own town once the railroad is put through, but the townsfolk want her gone. When four men hold up a stagecoach and kill a man the town officials, led by Emma Small, come to the saloon to grab four of Vienna's friends, the Dancin' Kid and his men. Vienna stands strong against them, and is aided by the presence of an old acquaintance of hers, Johnny Guitar, who is not what he seems. [+]

	Author	Review
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"There are extraordinary moments in the movie (...) It is also fascinating to watch her and Johnny use words as love weapons (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Bosley Crowther The New York Times	"Neither Miss Crawford nor director Nicholas Ray has made it any more than a flat walk-through (...) of western cliches (...) The color is slightly awful and the Arizona scenery is only fair."	NEG
United Kingdom	Peter Bradshaw The Guardian	"Unforgettably strange, brilliant western (...) An extraordinary psychological drama (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Variety	"[Crawford] should leave saddles and levis to someone else and stick to city lights for a background (...) Love, hate and violence, with little sympathy for the characters, is stirred up during the overlong film."	NEG
United States	Dave Kehr Chicago Reader	"For all its violence, this is a surpassingly tender, sensitive film (...) With Mercedes McCambridge, unforgettable as Crawford's butch nemesis"	POS
United States	Richard Brody The New Yorker	"Nicholas Ray is Hollywood’s most emotionally furious, extreme, and sensitive director"	POS
United States	Scott Tobias AV Club	"A film this singular isn’t so easy to pin down (...) Ray brought a leftist, feminist, revisionist sensibility that was at least 15 years ahead of its time"	POS
United States	Calum Marsh Slant	"There’s so much smuggled in just beneath the surface (...) It manages to humanize the drama and politics of McCarthyism while transforming it into something almost surreal (…) Rating: ★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Bruce Bennett IndieWire	"For its first third, 'Johnny Guitar' is an ingeniously realized piece of filmed theater (...) The saloon main space is so weirdly modern that it could almost have been the work of (...) production architect Ken Adam."	POS
United Kingdom	Tom Huddleston Time Out	"Joan Crawford explodes off the screen in this heady, Freudian western masterpiece (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United Kingdom	Kim Newman Empire	"A truly demented Western, with vividly colourful settings and and an almost operatic intensity of emotional and physical violence (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS

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