A good piece on Fuller’s western, featured on an excellent site, which I’d urge people to pop over and read, and browse around generally.
When it’s on: Monday, 11 May (2.50 pm)
Channel: Film4
IMDb Link
‘May I feel it?’
‘Uh-uh.’
‘Just curious.’
‘It might go off in your face.’
‘I’ll take a chance.’
One of the aspects of the Westerm I find most fascinating is its dying days, the realisation that American expansion has caught up with the untamed frontier, making its ways approach their ending. This is a theme of Forty Guns I really like. Both its hero, Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan), and rancher Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck), have long histories, complicated back stories, and know the elements that have defined their lives are drawing to a close. They’re becoming anachronisms, and their riding off in the direction of California together at the end is symbolic of the dawning new chapter in Arizona’s own tale.
But this is only one aspect of Forty Guns, a film I found very hard to pigeonhole…
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