A lawman clashes with a powerful female landowner and her small army of gunslingers.
Samuel Fuller (b. 1912) led multiple lives: a paperboy turned crime reporter turned published crime novelist, then a WWII soldier in the First Infantry Division of the U.S. army present at the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach as well as the first liberation of a concentration camp, and finally a screenwriter and director at one of Hollywood's biggest studios before going into independent production.
Forty Guns is not Fuller's first entry in the Western genre, but it remains his most abstract and expressionistic. Shooting in widescreen Cinemascope and black and white, it occasionally approaches a dreamlike atmosphere that sets it apart from its contemporaries.
Fuller subverts the typical Western with his strong female lead, and amplified this choice with the casting of screen legend Barbara Stanwyck, known for her toughness and intelligence. Having made a career of flirting with censorship and tackling sensitive subjects like racism and wartime cynicism, the sexual politics and innuendo in Forty Guns are taken to the extreme, the of the film originally Woman With A Whip.
Working with cinematographer Joseph F. Biroc, Fuller employed elaborate camera movements (some of the most sophisticated of his filmography) as well as innovative cutting. The entire film was shot in only ten days.
The film was relegated to B-Movie status upon release, but was majorly influential on both mainstream and independent Hollywood filmmakers (Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch) as well as foreign auteurs like Sergio Leone and Jean-Luc Godard (who paid homage just three years later with his debut film Breathless).
Running time is approx. 80 minutes.
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