Really Surprised!

i must have seen a different film!!

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Well followed Samuel Fuller writes and directs this borderline corny sagebrush melodrama. Very apt cast with dialogue a bit sappy, but not without sexual innuendo. Barbara Stanwyck plays Jessica Drummond, a prominent landowner, with her own posse of forty hired henchmen and a theme song. (Really). With a milquetoast sheriff, Ned Logan(Dean Jagger), Drummond has made herself the law of Cochise County, Arizona. The sheriff and whole town knuckles under to her whims and demands as they thunder through the territory. A former gunslinger turned United States Marshall, Griff Bonnell(Barry Sullivan)rides into town with two of his brothers to restore law and order. Jessica becomes smitten with the new lawman, all the while he has eyes for an attractive young female gunsmith(Eve Brent).In a scene where Drummond is to be dragged down the middle of the street behind a horse, a stunt woman refuses. Miss Stanwyck, in her mid 40's, did the scene herself suffering a few minor lacerations. Also featured: John Ericson, Gene Barry, Robert Dix, Sandra Wirth and Chuck Roberson.

Definitely one of the worst westerns ever made, it's even on par with 5 Card Stud.The writing here is absolutely pathetic and you wonder how Stanwyck, Sullivan and others allowed themselves to be in such an awful movie.The 40 Guns has absolutely no relevance here. The plot is pathetically drawn. Let's hear about the deputy stealing mail, and the obsessive relationship between Stanwyck and her brother.Instead, we are subjected to ruffians shooting up a town, and shots being fired all over the place. It's a wonder that more people didn't drop from all the firing.What is the meaning of this picture? Who wrote such garbage?

Forty Guns (1957)Sam Fuller's style is uncompromising and over the top. He pushes both melodrama and visual drama. And he's also extremely astute handling the actors and the space and light they move through. His movies are definitely experiences, from "The Naked Kiss" to "The Big Red One" all the way back to the masterpiece, "Pickup on South Street."And he usually tells a strong clear story. That's the big weakness here. It's as if all the over-sized elements, including Barbara Stanwyck as this unlikely woman power queen frontier figure with forty men at her beck and call, are juggled around enough to keep it interesting just on their own. Not only will the progress of events be sometimes confusing, it will at times also be too unlikely to hold water, which is even worse.Not that the movie isn't a thrill to watch. I mean watch, with your eyes. The sparkling widescreen photography is so good, so very good and original, you can't help but like that part of it. In a way that's sustaining--it's what kept me glued. But that's my thing. I'm a photographer. I love the physical structure of movies. This movie was made for me. It's made to be studied.And that's what "Forty Guns" is famous for, an over-sized influence. The French writers of the time (like Godard) and some later American upstarts (like Tarantino) have praised the filmmaking, if not always the film. You can certainly see, and appreciate, how much a movie like this foreshadowed the spaghetti westerns which have become so famous, but which were made six and more years later.And that's worth remembering, too. Westerns, as a genre, are well worn by now. The themes have been worked and overworked. To make a new fresh western means pushing it to some limit, and for Fuller that means a soap opera exaggeration. That means galloping horses endlessly around a waiting stagecoach as the horses jump in fear. That means a man walking up to his rival and walking and walking, far longer than it would take to cover the hundred yards shown, until reaching him and punching, not shooting him. It means a final glorious scene that is shown farther and farther in the distance and all you see are two little dots as figures--and yet you know what just happened, and how satisfying that is.And how unreasonable the events were getting us to that point. "Forty Guns" plays loose with archetypes in a pre-post-modern way that has made it weirdly contemporary. Fuller's films, like his unlikely contemporary Douglas Sirk's, have taken on a life of their own, as flawed as they are. This may not be the best place to start to love his work, but it's a good place to start to understand where movies had gotten to--some would say fallen--by the late 1950s. Check it out.

In Martin Scorcese's 'A Personal Journey Through American Movies' you can hear him, in his overview of Samuel Fuller, mention "Forty Guns" as one of his favorites. But he's not sure why."'Forty Guns' is--well--I don't know what the hell 'Forty Guns' is!" he barks.Okay well, at last I know what he means by his statement. How did I like it? Well, it left me rather ambivalent. Didn't affect me strongly either way. Its like a soup with a mixture of things in it: some likable; some not; but the broth itself adequate.There are a few interesting moments where I appreciated Fuller's visual compositions; or his sense of timing and story flow. The overall story (his creation) was inventive; as was the odd arrangement of his characters and the way he wrote their parts "against" the usual western clichés.But its simply a very weird movie; somewhat unsatisfying, I'm bound to say. Sometimes it seems like a noir-western; sometimes a noir/musical/western, sometimes a romance/family-drama/noir/musical/western.Definitely the the places where one character breaks out into song, are unsettling. And Dean Jagger's bizarre lovelorn scene with Stanwyck towards the end--where did that come from? Essentially, every character is somehow bent and twisted around by the screenplay to overturn and go against whatever they happened to be about; when first you are introduced to them. The sheriff is not what he seems; the town rowdy is not what he seems; the town tamers are not what they seem; the lady rancher is not what she seems. A bathhouse operator turns out to be a chorus boy. A gunsmith is a pretty young blond. A tornado cleaves through the middle of the film.What I'm trying to say is: not only is the internal structure here strange; and not only is the western 'world' surrounding the characters strange...but the total way in which events play out in the narrative, has all sorts of distortion and grotesqueness about it. Its a surreal film. Jack-in-the-Box type film, quirky, bumpy, and uneven.Casting was well done though; with actors I don't usually get a chance to see. Gene Barry, etc. Of course this is a Babs Stanwyck picture but surprisingly she doesn't have that much to perform here.At the end of it all I have no idea what Fuller was trying to convey with this western; perhaps it was all just a way of skewering sacred cows and infecting the genre with his own sense of humor.'Forty Guns' is decent but I'd not go out of my way to ever watch it again. Unlike Scorcese, it won't make my favorites list. But it was worth seeing.