We’ve been telling stories about the death of the Wild West for almost as long as we’ve told stories about the Wild West itself. And listen, I get it. The Wild West, as a concept, is this huge mythic playground in which you can tell virtually any story within any genre. And within that playground, you can pose these grand archetypes that can be bent and shaped into a million different forms to fit your particular point-of-view and theme.
Forty Guns, now available from Criterion in a new Blu-ray transfer, is a canny effort from writer-director Samuel Fuller (Shock Corridor, White Dog) to wrestle one of the great legends of the West into a story about how power is won and shared (or not), and of the toll that being a legend takes on the soul. If the studio-mandated happy ending neuters the film’s ultimate point a tad, Forty Guns is still a rich experience and a worthy riff on the legend of Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and their battle in Tombstone (the town, not the movie. But…I guess…yes, also the movie).
Not that these characters go by those names. No, instead this time the legendary lawman rolling into Tombstone is named Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan), accompanied by his brothers Wes (Gene Barry) and Chico (Robert Dix). Griff has indulged in his share of wildness in the past, but he’s made a clean-break from his days as a gun-for-hire and is now happy working for the Arizona attorney general’s office, serving papers and collecting arrests. Wes serves as Griff’s second gun, while baby brother Chico begs to be included in the family business. But Griff is insistent that Chico keep his head down and his hands clean. Soon, he promises, the brothers will pack it in with the Wild West entirely and head to California to be peaceful farmers with their parents.
And, hell, it might just have worked too. But for Jessica Drummond.
Fuller takes his sweet time getting to Barbara Stanwyck, instead taking time to establish the strange ecosystem of vaguely-open corruption within Tombstone, letting the black-clad lady’s reputation proceed her. Stanwyck is glimpsed as the Bonnell brothers ride into town, charging her steed at the head of a procession of the eponymous forty guns, a look of rapturous abandon plastered on her face. The next time we see Stanwyck’s Jessica, she’s charging into a sheriff’s station to demand in no uncertain terms the release of her brother Brockie (John Ericson) from a cell, the entire town capitulating to her at once.
Jessica, we learn, commands a group of forty ‘dragoons’ who follow her word without question and run the territory with absolute control. Brockie, the brother who she had to raise like a son, knows that no one can touch him so long as Jessica’s power is unquestioned, and the knowledge of his immunity has made him a cruel, bitter little shit who takes his feelings of impotence and entitlement out on anyone who crosses him.
Clearly Jessica is on a collision course with Griff and his brothers, but the relationship isn’t like either of them probably expected, what with her being sort-of a crime boss and him being there to arrest several of her crew. Jessica’s heard the legends of Griff Bonnell same as anyone, and she finds herself entranced with the man who is so different from the stories. As for Griff, he’s drawn to Jessica as well, both of them entwined in a shared understanding that the days of the Wild West are coming to an end and the time of larger-than-life figures like them are closing out with it.
That sense of times changing and power fading must have been especially poignant for Stanwyck. Despite being one of the biggest stars in the world throughout the 1930s and 40s, her career struggled to recover from the critical mistake she made of being a woman in Hollywood over the age of 40. After this movie, Stanwyck wouldn’t appear in another film for five years, and only sporadically after that. This would be a titanic shame anyway, but what makes it especially tragic is the evidence in Forty Guns that Stanwyck was still vitally aware of how to command the screen. When you watch Stanwyck in something like Double Indemnity, you are seeing a performer who is keenly aware of their body as an instrument, a tool in their arsenal, and with a precise understanding of the effect they have. In Forty Guns, Stanwyck and Jessica both are constantly aware of when and where to allow their vulnerabilities to show, if ever, and it makes those moments when the pose as an unstoppable force of nature fails all the more meaningful.
Sullivan and the other guys playing the Bonnell brothers are fine, so far as stock Western good guys go. While he’s not especially memorable in his own right, Sullivan makes a strong scene partner for Stanwyck, and in their scenes together you can see each actor teasing something gentle out of one another. There’s a scene about midway through the movie where Jessica and Griff are forced to take shelter from a storm in a shack together, and the way Fuller established a casual intimacy between the two goes a long way towards earning the eventual tension that comes with the film’s final stretch.
I feel like if Forty Guns went all the way with the heartbreak that it is clearly building towards, the film would be better remembered. Instead, you can feel Fuller marching his characters up to an inevitability that the film then flinches from actually playing out. Fuller claimed the studio demanded he provide the traditional clean victory, but you can still see the shape of how the story was meant to go. Even in this somewhat neutered form, Fuller displays an impressive degree of cold-blooded vision. There is violence in the film that truly hurts, and deaths that truly shock even if you know the vague outlines of the Tombstone (again, not the movie. But also yeah the movie) story.
Fuller shot the film in Cinemascope, and the final product marries the sweeping power of the frame with tight, intimate moments that work in tandem to convey individuals struggling for a place in a huge world that seems likely to leave them behind. The new transfer on the Criterion disc is gorgeous, accentuating not only the sprawl of the landscapes but the noir-ish influences as well, as shadows spread to entrap and swallow the characters.
The package by Criterion makes it clear that the star of this particular presentation is Fuller himself, coming loaded with interviews with his surviving family, a feature-length documentary, and archival interviews with the man himself.
Forty Guns reminds you of just how elastic the Western film, and the Western myth, truly can be, encapsulating so many themes and stories and genres within a perfectly straightforward tale about a power struggle in a crummy little desert town. If the film doesn’t belong in the highest echelons of the genre, it sits comfortably just beneath that pantheon. A tiny gem, a promise of all the riches that remain undiscovered.