Forty Guns

There was no director like Samuel Fuller, the former journalist, pulp writer, and soldier who became a director of genre pictures bursting with mad passion and driving energy. He was America’s kino-fist with a tabloid sensibility and his 1957 Western Forty Guns is his purest blast of cinematic thunder and melodramatic excess. Barbara Stanwyck stars as the "high riding woman with a whip" (as she's described in the film's theme song) Jessica Drummond, a black-clad rancher baroness who hires a private army of gun-toting cowboys to protect her Arizona empire. Barry Sullivan is Griff Bonnell, the cynical gunfighter who signs on as town marshal and immediately clashes with the territory queen. The plot plays like a whacked-out variation on the Earp-Clanton feud (with Gene Barry and Robert Dix lining up on the "Earp" side as Bonnell’s brothers), but the story is just a setting for the sexual energy and psychotic violence in the power plays over territorial authority that explodes onscreen in staccato editing, darting camerawork, and the maddest expressions of love this side of Duel in the Sun. Fans of classic Westerns may be confounded by the mix of operatic emotion and pulp style in this minor entry in the canon of Western movies, but fans of Fuller and maverick filmmaking should embrace it. Mastered from a new 4K restoration, this Criterion release features extras including the 2013 documentary A Fuller Life on the director, new interviews with Christa Lang Fuller and Samantha Fuller (the director's widow and daughter) and critic Imogen Sara Smith, an audio archival interview with Sam Fuller from 1969, and a booklet. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)