Event

Johnny Guitar

After helping a wounded gang member, a strong-willed female saloon owner is wrongly suspected of murder and bank robbery by a lynch mob.

Johnny Guitar is the Beauty and the Beast of Westerns, a Western dream. The cowboys vanish and die with the grace of ballerinas. The bold violent colour contributes to the sense of strangeness; the hues are vivid, sometimes very beautiful, always unexpected. - François Truffaut

Johnny Guitar is surely one of the most blatant psychosexual melodramas ever to disguise itself in that most commodious of genres, the Western. Roger Ebert

"The acidulous palette of the costumes and the décor conjure Ray's insolent, isolated fury; though the action is set in the nineteenth century, the actors break out of the story to foreshadow the stylishly electric revolutions to come." Richard Brody

"Yet for all its modernity, what still makes Johnny Guitar fit Truffauts description as the Beauty and the Beast of Westerns is its poetry, its feeling of timeless myth its ordering of all four elements (red rock, air, fire, waterfall) into the shape of a fairy tale or a folk ballad." - Jonathan Rosenbaum