Review of Forty Guns

Even by Sam Fuller standards this is a frenzied, hysterically paced film with lots of weird stuff thrown in like sexy female gunsmiths, artsy camera angles and shots (the most famous of which features the sexy gunsmith seen through the barrel of a rifle which Godard would use in "Breathless" as an homage to France's second favorite American director behind Jerry Lewis), a strolling minstrel cum bath house proprietor singing really dumb songs, a blind sheriff, a suicidal sheriff, a dust storm that comes out of nowhere and instantly vanishes, and of course Babs playing Snow Black on a white horse with forty...count 'em...gunmen/dwarves and who, in the film's sexist ending, trades in her noir for a frilly white dress and rides off with...yuck...stolid Barry Sullivan. If it all seems rather silly and vapid at its core that's because it is, with a too talky script, also by Fuller, and too florid and wooden acting (Babs, as always, gloriously excepted), and one wonders if Fuller's feverish pacing and antics are designed to distract the viewer from this emptiness.

Are there compensations? A few. For one, you've got wonderfully moody, black and white cinematography by Joe Biroc. And for another there is the theme of gun obsession that runs through the film, a trope that is more than a bit relevant to our NRA soaked times. And of course there is that climactic shootout which I won't spoil for you except to say that it magnificently violates one of Hollywood's oldest Western and gangster pic norms.

Bottom line: The French may venerate this film. I don't.

Grade: C plus.