Joan Crawford plays Vienna, a saloon worker who wears pants, carries guns, and rejects feminine submission. She is saddled with ambition grounded in Manifest Destiny, awaiting the railroad that will convert her land into capital. Meanwhile, Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge) leads a lynch mob against Vienna, fueled by jealousy disguised as civic righteousness. Through tilted angles and operatic closeups, Johnny Guitar abandons classical Western framing for expressionist frenzy, revealing how the genre’s masculine mythologies always contained their own subversion. In this deconstruction of the traditional Western, gender roles implode, yet McCarthyist paranoia bleeds through every frame, and westward settlement continues to drive its characters’ inner motivations. 1954, US, 35mm, 111 min.
Part of Cinema Revived: Timeless Selections from the Vault, an ongoing presentation of notable feature-length films from the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection.
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