Johnny Guitar

Screening with newly restored digital print.

Director: Nicholas Ray
Starring: Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge, Ernest Borgnine
Runtime: 100'
Year of production: 1954
Language: English
Subtitles: Greek

Lost lovers, ghosts from the past, demonic females and fragile men, gunslingers and outlaws, savage hatred and repressed desires give a fateful rendezvous inside a dusty saloon in the middle of nowhere, the ownership of which will be claimed by two women in a duel to death. As the independent and idealistic Joan Crawford is called upon to confront the psychotic and scheming Mercedes McCambridge, under the anxious gaze of an entire troupe of men who look like either unwilling pawns or immature boys pretending to be cowboys, Nicholas Ray signs off in garish technicolor shades the most bizarre western ever made.

"Johnny Guitar" is indeed a peculiar case of filmmaking, perhaps because no other creation of the genre has attempted to merge the male-dominated mythology of the Wild West with a vibrant pro-feminist agenda, a paroxysmal melodrama that is just one step short of full-blown hysteria, a fiery love story for which some of the most poetic dialogue was written and a clear allegory of the bitter McCarthyism and anti-communist persecution raging in America at the time. One of the finest creations ever made, the film retains a dreamlike and otherworldly style that gives it almost fairy-tale dimensions and contrasts the masculine ritualism of Westerns with a lyricism that makes it feel precious and strangely haunting. Just as the unforgettable song performed for the film by Peggy Lee. Loukas Katsikas