Samuel Fuller’s formidably feminist, embracingly revisionist 1957 western Forty Guns announces its boldness in an opening sequence whereby a ferocious Barbara Stanwyck stampedes and disrupts an approaching caravan of men on their way into the territory she commands from afar, heralded by her titular posse of miscreants and criminals who do her bidding. Set in Cochise County of Tombstone, AZ, the narrative is a major reworking of the famed Wyatt Earp gunfight at the O.K. Corral, replete with dueling simmering sibling rivalries, a ravaging tornado, an unwanted pregnancy and quickfire double entendre adorning the customary narrative arc of bloody comeuppance and forced romantic resolution.

Although Fuller’s original vision featured a compromised finale, the resulting film is still one of a few successfully subversive ventures daring to usurp the heteropatriarchy of 1950s American cultural norms—and within the parameters of the overly glorified, oft exaggerated approximations of the Old West, a time and a place where storytellers of a certain persuasion and a certain perspective have been allowed to canonize the country’s lawless history as a dust covered vacuum in which murder and mayhem became concretized into a myopic vision of what made America great for a select few. The film was one of three titles directed by Fuller in 1957, following China Gate (still in need of a restored release) and Run of the Arrow.

Reformed gunslinger Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan), who now works for the Attorney General’s office, arrives in 1880s Tombstone in Cochise County, Arizona looking to arrest Howard Swain (Chuck Roberson) for mail robbery. But Swain is one of forty hired hands working for land owner Jessica Drummond (Stanwyck), an iron-fisted rancher who has all the county’s powerful men in her pocket as well. But Jessica’s belligerent, alcoholic brother Brockie (John Ericson), terrorizes the town with his violence and when Griff cuts one of Brockie’s rampages short with the help of his brothers Wes (Gene Barry) and Chico (Robert Dix), it leads him to Jessica while Wes falls for Louvenia (Eve Brent), daughter of the local gunslinger. Their romances will eventually leave them both vulnerable to the tempestuousness of Brockie.

Fans of Stanwyck eat your heart out as her Jessica Drummond is one of the actress’ most commanding roles from her late period in film (which ended with William Castle’s 1964 The Night Walker, though she would appear in television through the 1980s). By the period’s Hollywood studio standards, Stanwyck was well past her sell-by date, and by the time of Forty Guns it had already been a decade since she’d received her fourth and last Academy Award nomination for Sorry, Wrong Number (1948). At the age of fifty and doing her own stunts (including being dragged by a horse in a sequence which rivals what Yorgos Lanthimos put Rachel Weisz through in 2018’s The Favourite), the film is also by far a culmination of the performer’s penchant for Westerns, from her early success as Annie Oakley (1935) to other 50s features such as Cattle Queen of Montana (1954) and The Maverick Queen (1956)—and throw in a bit of equestrian rehashes from her B-side, like The Woman in Red (1935).

Stanwyck’s only rival for attention is Fuller’s jam-packed narrative, which outlines the extreme dysfunction of her familial existence, including a wayward brother she treats more like a son (confronting him for beating the young woman he’s impregnated, she chides “if you can’t handle a horse without spurs, you have no business riding.”) She’s also the sexual instigator when it comes to the supposed romance with Barry Sullivan’s Griff, brazenly asking to “feel his gun” which might “go off in your face.” Of course, the film’s piece de resistance comes in the grand shootout, whereby Griff is forced to shoot through Jessica in order to kill her brother, which is where the finale’s complications were born and resulted in a finale where Jessica Drummond and her feelings for Griff get retro-fitted for appropriate cultural norms.

A significant recuperation of Fuller’s mid-period films, Forty Guns joins Criterion’s releases of many items from his filmography including The Naked Kiss, Shock Corridor, Pickup on South Street and White Dog as well as the Eclipse release of his early titles (I Shot Jesse James; The Steel Helmet; The Baron of Arizona), while one can turn to Twilight Time for a continuing selection of other titles, such as Hell and High Water, The Crimson Kimono, and Underworld USA.

Disc Review:

Criterion delivers Forty Guns as a new 4K digital restoration, presented in 2.35:1 with uncompressed monaural soundtrack. Picture and sound quality are superb in this transfer, a marked improvement from the film’s previous DVD release by Twentieth Century Fox in 2005. A bevy of new features and interviews are included as extra features, including an optional track from 1969 recorded with Samuel Fuller at the National Film Theater in London where he discusses the film.

Fuller Women:

Criterion conducted this nineteen-minute interview with Fuller’s widow Christa Lang Fuller, and daughter Samantha Fuller in 2018, both revealing special tidbits about the film and Fuller (such as the part being written for Stanwyck).

Woman with a Whip:

Criterion conducted this thirty-four-minute interview in New York in 2018 with Imogen Sara Smith, author of In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City, citing Fuller as a ‘genre unto himself.’

A Fuller Life:

Samantha Fuller brought together a variety of her father’s collaborators and various personalities to read from his autobiography for this eighty-minute 2013 documentary A Fuller Life.

Final Thoughts:

“I need a strong man to carry out my orders,” quips Stanwyck. “And a weak man to take them” retorts her love interest. And there’s the one and only Barbara Stanwyck as the woman who in the darkness binds them in Samuel Fuller’s high caliber Forty Guns.

Film Review: ★★★★/☆☆☆☆☆

Disc Review: ★★★★/☆☆☆☆☆