BUY TICKETS HERE
Join us at 1 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 3, for a screening of “Johnny Guitar,” director Nicholas Ray’s 1954 landmark western starring Joan Crawford as a strong-willed female saloon owner who is wrongly suspected of murder and bank robbery after helping a wounded gang member.
JOHNNY GUITAR | 1954 | DIRECTOR: Nicholas Ray | WITH: Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge, Ernest Borgnine, John Carradine | RUNNING TIME: 1H 50M | UNRATED Contains mild violence
“The Western is the prime political genre, and Nicholas Ray’s “Johnny Guitar” is one of the greatest Westerns, but its political ideas are hardly the source of its enduring—and controversial—power. What makes the movie is the performances by its lead actors, Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden, which are different in kind from any others that I’ve seen, including by those actors elsewhere.
“Performances are always connected to direction, but the ones in “Johnny Guitar” appear even more so—in terms of the composition of images, the positioning of actors relative to one another and to the décor, and, above all, the movie’s general tone—than literally any Hollywood movie I know, including such epochally inventive ones as “Citizen Kane” and “Vertigo.” Without any intellectual palaver, metafictional games, or reflexive winks, “Johnny Guitar” is a theory of cinema in motion.
“Even in the studio world of seductive artifice, “Johnny Guitar” stands out; it achieves an unmatched height of stylized behavior. The film is a sort of cinematic opera in which scenes have the force of arias, in which dialogue less advances the action than it adorns the movie like bruising and vulnerable lyric poetry, in which the framing of actors forms a unique visual music—even unique in the career of its director, Nicholas Ray, who made many enduring classics (such as “In a Lonely Place” and “Rebel Without a Cause”) but nowhere else reached the singular intensity and stylistic purity of “Johnny Guitar.”
“It’s among the very heights of what the Hollywood system, for all its distortions and exclusions, was capable of—and, even more important, it represents the furthest extreme that the star system could produce or allow.” — Richard Brody, New Yorker
Tickets are $6 and available at link above. Students use code STUDENT at checkout for free admission (must show student ID at the door).
