Forty Guns – Review

When you hear about a classic film, it’s difficult not to be drawn into the hype surrounding it; your opinions can’t help but be formed somewhat by those of others, heightening what should be your own clear, unbiased reaction. If you happen to like, or even love Forty Guns, Samuel Fuller’s 1957 Western, then more power to you – but make certain that you like it for the right reasons. All you have to do is judge the movie on its merits alone – but in so doing, you may end up finding that Fuller’s film is a tempestuously busy movie, overhanging with histrionic melodrama and overburdened by a cloying sense of self-importance.

To describe the plot of Forty Guns would be an exercise in futility, for it never settles in one place long enough to leave any impression – but in barebones terms, Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck) is a rancher with a tough streak, but soon falls in love with her new employee; extreme silliness ensues, as the two survive a tornado together (a short-lived set piece with zero build-up, that serves character development little to nothing) and attempt to navigate a storyline involving wrongly accused ranch hands and unrequited loves. Any semblance of narrative soon dissolves in a frothy wake of ill-timed plot points, lurching our characters through clichéd Western pastiches as if they were obstacles on a devious assault course. Which is a downright shame, as Fuller’s execution in some of these instances is faultless, a highlight being an ambush toward the film’s end which goes haywire. But before he’s finished with one thing – even an almost thrilling sequence like this – he’s onto the next, therefore never allowing his film to just be itself.

There are flashes of a great Western hidden somewhere in Forty Guns’ unwieldy frame; a collection of potentially excellent moments, albeit with any substance between them jettisoned. There’s even the wistful title track, played at different points and guises throughout, that has every signal of being a classic movie soundtrack staple – but there’s nothing to lift it up to that status. What results is a film that simply doesn’t make much sense; if we’re given no direction to follow, or bestowed with none of the pieces to put together ourselves, we’re not going to care much about the end product. It’s a distinct shame, as Fuller would go on to be a wildly inventive and important director – just take a look at 1963’s Shock Corridor for evidence of that – and while there’s signs of that here, Forty Guns feels more like a warm-up, a Western that obviously cares about everything to do with its genre, but wants to transpose those aspects into something more clever, more subversive, more dramatic. Fuller’s experiment might not work, but that hasn’t stopped many touting it as a classic film. Just remember: see it for yourself first.

Forty Guns is out now via Masters of Cinema on DVD and Blu-ray.