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Forty Guns

Screening: Monday 16 July, 6:30pm

Forty Guns (Samuel Fuller, USA 1957)

Few films have elicited as much fevered praise, bewildered paeans, and hyperbolic claims as Forty Guns. Godard pronounced it "along with House of Bamboo, Fuller’s best film… It is full of innovations and inventive direction," and quoted one of its most audacious shots in Breathless. Truffaut lifted its ending in The Bride Wore Black. Scorsese loves Forty Guns, but doesn’t quite know what to make of it: "It’s not even really a Western — I don’t know what it is — Forty Guns doesn’t care."

It has been called "avant-garde" (Jonathan Rosenbaum), "a wild and reckless western that separates the cultish from the sheepish" (Andrew Sarris), and "still the most subversively entertaining Western ever made" (Dennis Bartok). Barbara Stanwyck is even more berserk than Mercedes McCambridge in Johnny Guitar as Jessica, a leather-clad cattle baroness who runs a chunk of Cochise County with her punk brother. Brandishing her leather whip and her might against Griff Bonnell, a "legal killer" with a sense of justice, Jessica proves her claim to have been "bitten by a rattler when I was fifteen."

Fuller fills the frame with phallic references, Jessica’s sexual frenzy translated into naked gun-lust in images and verbal exchanges that make the connection between dick and Derringer more than explicit. ("May I touch it?"… "It may go off in your face.") "This is the Fuller movie about which it is hardest to write because more than any other it is pure experience, pure movie" (Nicholas Garnham).

Written by Fuller. Photographed by Jospeh F. Brice. With Barbara Stanwyck, Barry Sullivan, Dean Jagger, John Ericson.

(16mm, B&W, 80 mins, PG medium level violence)

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