Oeuvre is an in-depth examination of the entire body of work of an important director.
In 1957, Samuel Fuller followed up Run of the Arrow with another western: Forty Guns, about an expert gunfighter named Griff (Barry Sullivan) and his two brothers who mosey into a town where a strict landowner named Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck) runs the show, and whose cronies (the eponymous 40 guns) regularly run amuck through town at their leisure, disrupting quiet living and local business alike. It sounds a bit rote, but this is Fuller we’re talking about. Is it ever so simple?
Samuel Fuller’s films always display dual identities. They’re often lower-tier B-pictures, but also uniquely personal and artistic, especially in contrast with A-pictures of the day. There’s a collision of high and low in his movies that perfectly encapsulate the pop culture indispensability of cinema. Just look at Forty Guns, which Fuller and his crew shot in 10 days in CinemaScope, making for an aesthetically beautiful quickie production. No wonder the French New Wave worshiped this guy. From the gutter, the stars.
Here’s the twist: once the brothers settle into town, what follows, surprisingly, isn’t an all-out Kurosawa-style bloodbath (though there are a couple shootouts and a cyclone), but rather a Shakespearean drama with a six-shooter. Rather than totally characterize Drummond’s brother Brockie as a violent boor, Fuller gives the antagonist a scene of tenderness with his “half-breed” girlfriend. Of course, the scene ends with him wailing on her, but that’s still the auteur taking a little extra time to paint one of his characters. The narrative threads continue as Fuller establishes a few different subplots, giving each of the brothers something to do – one wants to be a gunfighter like his brother, the other becomes the town’s sheriff.
Going beyond mere Shakespearian melodrama, more fascinating is Forty Guns’ genre dabbling. There’s a chorus-like troubadour who periodically pops up to lay down some theme with a song, effectively making the film a musical. There’s a surprising amount of comedy, too. There are gags that point out Drummond’s ludicrous number of henchmen and double entendres so obvious that they’re barely 1.5 entendres: “I’ve never kissed a gunsmith before.” “Any recoil?”
The casting of Fuller’s films are always notable, as his profile rarely allows him to cast superstars. Instead, he casts interesting actors. His Robert-Forster-meets-Dr.-No like features and distracting, obviously not from ’round there accent aside, Sullivan’s Griff is a curious play on the typical outsider gunman archetype. Stern and believable, despite never killing anyone until the end, Fuller’s script and Sullivan’s performance even give Griff a tender side, as a blossoming romance with Drummond brings a teensy bit of complexity to what could have been a very simplistic film.
So, in the end, it’s only kind of simplistic. Casting Barbara Stanwyck as Jessica Drummond is a brilliant move, giving the character a built-in stature and power, especially if viewers have also seen her turn in Anthony Mann’s The Furies. Even without that prior knowledge, Stanwyck exudes authority without being sexless as showcased in a tender but not character assassinating scene with Griff in a stable seeking shelter from a storm. Knowing that she did her own stunt during the horse dragging scene certainly adds to her cred. Unsurprisingly, the film eventually undercuts her strength by going for what the troubadour’s been crooning about all along (“But if someone could break her/ And take her whip away . . . You may find that a woman with a whip/ Is only a woman after all“).
With all this talk of feelings and wild women being tamed, you’d think that Fuller had gotten soft with Forty Guns. Not quite. In fact, when Griff finally has to murder somebody at the end of the film, he does it in a spectacularly cruel way, yet delivers the fatal blow with the stern, surgical precision of a jaded doctor. This climactic scene is the penultimate one, but should have been the conclusion and given birth to stark, violent 1970s cinema about 15 years too early. Instead, Forty Guns closes out with a relatively upbeat Hollywood ending that feels tacked on as the crane shot rises a bit and our surviving characters slowly ride off into the horizon. It may be modern sensibilities invading a film that’s generally of-its-time, but the penultimate scene was an exclamation point on the film while the closer is an ellipsis followed by some emoticons.
Forty Guns isn’t exactly a powerhouse showing from Fuller. It lacks the verve of his best films, but is too subtly strange and idiosyncratic to be considered hackwork. Curiously, it ended up being the last western Fuller ever directed, after which the director moved on to a subject he had never depicted before: World War II.
by Danny Djeljosevic
See Also: Oeuvre: Fuller- Run of the Arrow
