I’ve tried putting my finger on Johnny Guitar (1954) ever since I first saw it, but never can. It can feel like an entirely new film every time, like rewatching a play over and over again where all the blocks and beats are the same but something unique falls out each time. It’s a slippery movie, sliding between low-budget post-war Western and some sort of tiny, TruColor operetta whose emotions are much larger than the screen can seem to contain. Its architectural mise en scene is blunt at times and razor-sharp in others, a bludgeon and a knife’s edge of bodies on screen.
Characters either seem disaffected, like the men working the gambling table in Vienna’s or the glimpses of townspeople who are aren’t part of the hateful posse led by a searing Emma (Mercedes McCambridge) or a full HUAC-mode Ward Bond as McIvers. Joan Crawford as Vienna is explosive in her performance, with her eyes shooting like bullets, her gaze controlling a room as much as her gun. Then there’s Johnny Guitar (or Logan, as he’s more infamously known), played ambivalently by Sterling Hayden. Johnny has a cool demeanor that’s quickly revealed to be a shield for his bursting passion.
Johnny, while being one of the best guns in the West, is out of control of his body—he’s gun-crazy, an impulsive killer. And good at it. He tries to hide himself for who he is, yet Vienna still loves him for it, and he loves her back even though he resents her and her command of her body. It’s heavily implied that Vienna, long before she ever owned a saloon and sought to build a town, was a sex worker of some sort, and took a special liking to Johnny above all others. He feared being tied down so he left. Meanwhile, Vienna got to work to build something for herself. It’s implied that she used her sexual prowess to gain enough money and insider information to figure out a spot where the next railroad boom will be, and she plans to build a town there. Emma and McIvers can’t stand that this could take power away from their ranching town, as they believe they’re entitled to the land and can’t live with an “outsider” having any say in it.
I’ve never understood the “camp” label on the film, or at least that’s never how I’ve enjoyed it—it’s always been too directly emotionally effective on me to use that lens. Every time I rewatch it, though, I do see an increasingly strange and stark queer reading to it, as Johnny Guitar plays as a sort of psychosexual melodrama with tension between Johnny and Vienna, as well as the suspected outlaw leader, the Dancing Kid, but there’s also a homoerotic tension between Johnny and the Kid in their battle over Vienna and—the biggest driver of the plot—a war of jealousy between Vienna and Emma. Vienna suspects that Emma has a thing for the Kid, something she could never admit to because of its social implications, but subtextually that anger of one’s desires misaligning with societal expectation suggests a relationship between Vienna and Emma. Emma’s ravaging desire to run Vienna out of town or even kill her is, in this way, an attempt to snuff out or even punish her own desires.
Nicholas Ray’s cinema is always one of outcasts, of the people on the fringes. By far his most famous work, Rebel Without a Cause, is a decidedly stranger movie than its reputation as a teen classic would imply, as is James Dean’s legendary performance. Rebel, however, is typical Ray: it’s a film about building an alternative society when the overarching one has failed its misfits. It’s the same story again and again from They Live By Night (1948) to We Can’t Go Home Again (1973). What’s stunning in Rebel is how it’s rejection of the family structure leads to the reinvention of it in play while also being as explicit as a Hollywood film from the 1950s can be in its heroes being queer (notable too that it’s an open secret that Ray and Dean were bisexual, and likely even had a relationship during the film). Johnny Guitar is probably the finest example of this, or at least the most dynamic—the whole world of Guitar’s New Mexico seems to be an entire town where people are trying to suppress that they’re gay. Vienna’s the master of it, the only one in control of her body and her sexuality—some are fearful of it, some love her for it, and some hate her enough that it makes them want to murder her in cold blood.