Forty Guns: High-Riding Woman

Forty Guns is one of six sensationalistic pictures Fuller subsequently completed through his independent production company, Globe Enterprises, between 1956 and 1961. The Globe years saw Fuller flinging off the corset of quality controls that had shaped his studio releases, embracing more loosely constructed plots, offbeat humor, jarring tonal shifts, and frequently daring content. Financed and distributed by Fox for $429,000—far less than Fuller’s typical outlay when he was under contract at the studio—Forty Guns was produced independently on Fox’s back lot and released at both the top and bottom half of double bills. The picture received positive reviews for its solid cast and fast-paced action but was not a box-office performer. Today, however, we recognize it as Fuller’s most entertaining and audacious assault on classical and generic conventions up to this point in his career—loopy, jarring, and, more than once, jaw-dropping. There’s even a tornado!

At the center of the film are the two main figures from the opening scene: the Wyatt Earp–like federal marshal at the reins of the wagon, Griff Bonell (Barry Sullivan), and the “high-riding woman with a whip,” Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck). Griff arrives in Tombstone with his younger brothers, Wes (Gene Barry) and Chico (Robert Dix), to deliver a warrant. They find their suspect under the employ of Jessica, a land baron­ess and the boss of Cochise County, who is weighed down by a younger brother of her own, the unhinged Brockie (John Ericson). A renowned lawman who has forsworn gunplay because he “can’t miss,” Griff hesitates to get involved in local matters but finds himself drawn to Jessica. Jessica is attracted to Griff’s confidence and capability—they mirror her own—but wants him to work for her. The pair’s romantic and familial loyalties come into seemingly insurmountable conflict when Brockie kills Wes on his wedding day, leading to a final showdown where Griff shoots through Jessica to kill Brockie. 

The presentation of Wes and Louvenia’s wedding is similarly daring, as Fuller turns the celebration into a prologue to the funeral. The nuptials themselves are not seen—only the couple’s joyful emergence from the church. Then a shot rings out while the families pose for a picture. Images of Wes and Louvenia are rapidly juxtaposed as they collapse to the ground. The bride lies trapped beneath her dead husband, crying like a wounded animal: “Wes! Wes!” The high-spirited, flirty young couple are married for all of thirty seconds—the end of which is about as extreme a tonal shift as we see charted in Fuller’s work. A slow dissolve then segues into Wes’s funeral. Typically, western funerals emphasize communal grief and the vulnerability of settlers on the untamed frontier. In Forty Guns, the three-shot scene reduces the ritual to its barest iconography: the widow, the hearse, and the act of mourning, here depicted through the town balladeer, Barney (Jidge Carroll), singing “God Has His Arms Around Me.” While Fuller’s Run of the Arrow (also 1957) respectfully engaged the tropes of the cavalry-and-Indian western while expanding their thematic application, Forty Guns utterly transforms its genre in startlingly novel ways.

Equally memorable is the character of Jessica Drummond, as written by Fuller and performed by Stanwyck, a sharp contrast to the typical helpmate or moral-conscience role fulfilled by most female protagonists in westerns. Fuller consistently worked tough, strong-minded women into his pictures—whether as supporting characters, such as Thelma Ritter’s streetwise Moe in Pickup on South Street, or as protagonists second to no man, such as Angie Dickinson’s canny smuggler Lucky Legs in China Gate (1957)—and from the very opening of the film, Jessica’s dominion over men is on display. When Griff goes to her house to deliver the warrant for her hired hand, the camera follows the paper as it is passed down the table, the length of the shot (and of the table) a visual illustration of the sheer number of men Jessica commands—not just the forty guns but also the politicians, judges, and marshal who are present. As Jessica and Griff languidly make love after the melodramatic appearance of the tornado, she tells him, “I need a strong man to carry out my orders.” “And a weak man to take them,” he replies, the deep shadows of Joseph Biroc’s high-contrast photography crisscrossing their bodies and spelling doom. Sullivan and Stanwyck clearly have fun with Fuller’s dialogue, their easy flirtation a reminder that they had shared the screen just a year before in Republic’s The Maverick Queen, also playing characters on opposite sides of the law. Stanwyck’s tough-cookie persona and a string of earlier turns as fierce women in westerns—The Furies (1950), Cattle Queen of Montana (1954), and The Maverick Queen among them—made her a natural fit for the part, but she gives this character subtle shading throughout, bringing not only determination and anger but also real desire, tenderness, and remorse to the role. Stanwyck did all her own riding and stunts for the film, including three takes of the vividly staged tornado sequence, in which she is dragged behind her horse. Fuller was quite impressed by her dedication, describing her as “a helluva gal” in his autobiography.