Forty Guns is a good enough western, very much worth to see on the big screen (especially in the kind of case I did, first on a double bill with Johnny Guitar), though I wouldn't put it past genre fans to find better pieces of work. Barbara Stanwyck is interesting in a role that does go for the feminist edge as a cowgirl, of sorts, who leads a posse of 40 gunslingers (hence the title) while un-rest still goes over the town she looks over. She also is in a relationship with a man that could lead to some trouble. The story itself is not the sturdiest in filmmaker Samuel Fuller's cannon of works, which is saying a lot as he often creates really spectacularly B-type stories for his films. What he does do differently that another director wouldn't do is inject a very personal, if disguised in genre, kind of style to this story.
Some scenes still stick in my head strongly a year after seeing the film just by the visuals of it, how a couple of scenes are shot and edited for an impact only Fuller could produce. Consequently, these ARE in the main action scenes of the film, involving a man walking down a street against another gunslinger, unstoppable, with Fuller getting the right rhythm with his tracking shot cutting to a stark close-up. Maybe the most staggering scene (however rather over-the-top) is the death outside the church, with a rather symbolic message tied to the shock of it. And the climax is a white-knuckled even for its time. But its denouement seems to carry over from some of the more conventional aspects of the film, albeit by insistence from the studio. Nothing too wrong with the work by Stanwyck, Fuller, and the other character actors like Barry Sullivan and Dean Jagger, though I'd be lying if I said it was one of the best westerns of the 50's.
Some scenes still stick in my head strongly a year after seeing the film just by the visuals of it, how a couple of scenes are shot and edited for an impact only Fuller could produce. Consequently, these ARE in the main action scenes of the film, involving a man walking down a street against another gunslinger, unstoppable, with Fuller getting the right rhythm with his tracking shot cutting to a stark close-up. Maybe the most staggering scene (however rather over-the-top) is the death outside the church, with a rather symbolic message tied to the shock of it. And the climax is a white-knuckled even for its time. But its denouement seems to carry over from some of the more conventional aspects of the film, albeit by insistence from the studio. Nothing too wrong with the work by Stanwyck, Fuller, and the other character actors like Barry Sullivan and Dean Jagger, though I'd be lying if I said it was one of the best westerns of the 50's.