Johnny Guitar is a sham Western, a risible and garish melodrama, and a guise for the boiling, salacious sexual tendencies of its characters, who are not what they appear to be. It is the last of these, as the meatiness and sweat hidden by the unserious platitudes of the genre, that makes Johnny Guitar an adroit film to those willing to look beneath its shiny, Saran-wrap surface. The obvious parallels to McCarthyism, in spite of what many critics have seen as the satirical value of this tidbit, are far less interesting than the meat of the film—for obvious reasons. The existence of contemporary political criticism, embedded within the film itself, has historical rather than cinematic value, and is less than interesting when the unseen passions are both subversive and innate to these glorious characters.
The uniqueness of Johnny Guitar is that it is salacious as well as veiled, hiding its secrets in plain sight. Mercedes McCambridge, with her smallish, ferret-like features, plays Emma Small as a vixen with a vendetta. Vienna is to her anathema, a mannish woman that happens to incite her as a flame to her itching, tempted fingers. Joan Crawford is the colder, more distant character, but they feed off each other, and their mutual resentment is the boiling over of an unknown excitement that is less than conscious—but nonetheless palpable. This powerful resentment leads to the unmistakable arousal of Emma, who sets fire to Vienna’s building and, with a lubricious smile betraying a lip-smacking satisfaction, embodies a woman using vicious pretexts to sate her own instincts.
Johnny ‘Guitar’, who is the former gunslinger Johnny Logan, is played by the unwieldy Sterling Hayden, whose laid-back romantic gestures toward the desiccated Vienna are those of a man intruding on more vivid passions. He does a service to the plot, but the psychological peculiarity of the film belongs to the two females, Vienna and Emma, who have it out in the end.
François Truffaut, an espouser of La Nouvelle Vague, admired this film for its boldness and its use of color. Vienna especially exhibits a striking choice of colors—many of them primary—wearing black and robust red and yellow, and suggesting the torrent of veiled passions and the vigor of her character. For Johnny Guitar, however predictable and prosaic, is a film of signs, colors, hints, and suggestions, and nothing is as it seems. The colorful, unsettled psychologies of the characters justify the genre conventions, making them more than any Western could be.
