This western is the best gay camp movie ever made

What is Johnny Guitar about?

The plot is this: Vienna (Joan Crawford) is a saloon owner who has a successful establishment built where the future railroad will eventually run, which is really just a smart business. She hangs around with a group of slackers led by the “Dancing Child” (Scott Brady), in love with Vienna; this angers Emma SmallMercedes McCambridge) who has a longstanding feud with Vienna, in part because Emma is in love with the Kid (yes… of course). When a group of four thieves rob a stagecoach and kill someone, Emma and her squad blame Vena and her boys for it, wanting to lynch them. While this is going on, Vienna’s old craze, once-great gunslinger Johnny GuitarSterling Hayden) travels to the city, wishing to reunite with Vienna, and has chosen the most inopportune time to return. Let the cat fights begin!

Actors are presented in a unique light

In trying to understand what makes this ride so wild, the best place to start is with its main characters: Joan Crawford, Mercedes McCambridge, and Sterling Hayden. Both women have deep ties to the iconic/weird heritage of cinema, albeit in very different ways. Crawford posthumously gained a reputation as a camp icon thanks to her vicious persona, infamous diva behavior, and Faye Dunawaypicture of her in Dear mommy; McCambridge has long played hardened women of dubious morality, a type that would probably fit the modern label of “man”. This may be due to her cameo role in Touch of Evil as head of the leather biker gang Luz Benedict in Giant constantly shooting at Elizabeth Tayloror her voice works like a demon possessing Regan in Exorcist. Seeing these two in the same movie, where they are organized to be the most exaggerated versions of their archetypes, combined with their real-life behind-the-scenes rivalry seeping into performances, adds to Crawford and McCambridge’s persistence. temperature of their heat relative to each other up to JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure- the level of ambiguous attraction.

In Hayden’s case, subversion is more about how audiences perceive him as a movie star. Hayden was a classic tough guy actor in the vein of Robert Mitchum, Lee Marvinor Robert Ryan, known for playing fearsome thugs with a voice composed of salt water and tobacco. So, think of the surprise to see him in a straight-forward western, which should be his typical stomp, and he’s the living embodiment of a beta: a man longing to return to the love of his life who is more than often portrayed as indifferent to asserting his masculinity and remarkably subservient to Vienna. . There are several scenes where Johnny is in or standing next to Vienna’s physical space while other things are happening and he shows her a reverence overflowing with admiration. He’ll look into her eyes the way a lover looks at someone on a moonlit balcony when she doesn’t even look at him, or affectionately buckle her belt while she’s busy talking to Baby.

Johnny Guitar Men Are Vulnerable While Women Have All Power

This in itself is not all that unique; it could have been a simple variation on the formula and just a remarkably bland male character in a typical western novel. But what makes this scenario particularly wild is the way not only Johnny is portrayed, but all the male characters, especially when compared to Vienna and Emma. All male characters are portrayed as either insecure about their masculinity, seeking to join a mob mentality and maintaining a matriarchal power structure for the sake of violence, or, in Johnny’s case, completely uncaring or ineffective in proving their masculinity. In one of the film’s most famous lines, the bartender at a Viennese saloon claims that he has “never seen a woman who looked more like a man” than Vienna, and admits that this makes him “feel like I’m not a man.” Emma pushes the men to go along with her plan to force Vienna out of town by questioning their masculinity and insisting, “You act like she’s some kind of fine lady and doing nothing makes you all fine gentlemen…well, you’re not.” and you are not,” and how none of them could decide to save their lives. Again and again, men turn to the feminine power of Emma and Vienna.

Vena and Emma are effectively presented as two alphas with enough conviction and general rage towards each other that they can bend the surrounding men to their will. In one of the most daring shots in the entire film, Emma walks slowly through a Viennese saloon, followed by a whole crowd of men; as she walks we get a wide shot showing this motley group of men slowly forming a triangular arrangement of Busby Berkeley, though she never told them to do so. They scurry after her like little ants behind the Queen. There’s a long dialogue sequence where Johnny practically begs Vena to acknowledge their former relationship and that she still has feelings for him, but she can only respond with viciously sarcastic lies.

Even when she says she’s been waiting years for his return and that “I still love you like you love me” she looks at him like a dagger and sounds like she’s actively trying to vomit the toxic venom and what’s even crazier, he’s in pretty much accepts it. ! Instead of starting an argument or storming out, he says a bitter “thank you very much”. Think about how bad he must be just to accept the love of his life verbally spanking and firing him like that! On top of that, he actually manages to convince her to fall in love with him again, practically throwing himself into the fire for her, and that’s what it took for her to finally break down and say, “Okay, you have another chance.” These two examples show that the film not only ruthlessly allows women to display uglier “unfeminine” emotions, but also subtly taunts supposedly tough men for being crushed for who they are.

What does Johnny Guitar camp do?

But how is it that the film actively laughs at male figures, and not just presents them in an unusual way? Also, why aren’t the two main characters just pioneers in the “strong female character” trope, but likely rivals with a lesbian code, engaging in a catfight so tense it would make Andrew Lloyd Webber blush? It comes down to two things: camp and style (same difference). One of the defining characteristics of Camp is its sincerity; you can’t wink, break the fourth wall, otherwise honesty is sucked out of the material. While it’s not a film where every line of dialogue is filled with innuendo or loaded with explicit sexual innuendo, Ray’s staging, cheap production management, and directing the actors combine to turn the story into a realm of bizarre psychosexual drama. without losing the sincerity needed for pop-western mythology.

Take the scene where Johnny and Vena go on a romantic trip, but the sunset behind them looks like a painting you’d buy in a Western novelty store for $20. Or when Emma practically bites her knuckles, holding back orgasmic glee whenever she insists on killing Vena; or even when Ray is filming a scene where Vena and Emma are having a tough conversation with each other, and Vena is standing high enough in the stairwell that it looks like Emma’s face could be right in her crotch, it’s all hysterical because the movie doesn’t dwell on any of them. Viewers should practically break their necks as they look back at the moment that just happened and exclaim, “Wait, what was that about?”

The film is constantly peppered with these little comic digressions that work to talk about the underlying themes and inside jokes. Take on a squad of men who didn’t even bother to intervene in Vena and Emma’s final duel or even see Johnny hiding in plain sight to free Vena from a lynch attempt. Or Joan Crawford’s eyes pop out when she calls Emma and her men hypocrites who incite them to kill her; all of these moments come together in a spinning dervish of the kind of shamelessly enjoyable weird (if not outright weird) movies that people today are far more aware of how to enjoy. Audiences in 1954 must have been shocked by the brash ferocity of Crawford and McCambridge and/or shocked by the cowardice of these men, but the joke is that they missed out on one of the most subversive Westerns ever made.