Johnny Guitar

Johnny Guitar is a 1954 Western film directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge, Scott Brady, Ward Bond, Ben Cooper, Ernest Borgnine, John Carradine, Royal Dano, Paul Fix, Rhys Williams, Frank Ferguson, and Ian MacDonald It shares a name with the song by Peggy Lee and features music from the song. This isn't your typical western and has obsessed women as main characters. It shows up on several best-of lists and is worth seeing even if you're not a fan of Joan Crawford. We saw it on Amazon Prime. It can be rented on Youtube for $2.99.

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Slant Magazine gives it 4 out of 4 stars and says, "It’s a film that’s many things to many people, from camp spectacular to revisionist genre epic, and nearly every reading seems viable. Was it Nicholas Ray’s intention to subvert every expectation, to undermine the conventions of the most American of genres? "

The Guardian calls it an "unforgettably strange, brilliant western". IndieWire concludes, "Ray made a completely over the top film that evokes the gender inequality, witch hunt sensibility and civic timidity within the mid-50’s culture that produced it more memorably than any other western movie of its era." The New Yorker calls it "miraculous" and says, "Nicholas Ray is Hollywood’s most emotionally furious, extreme, and sensitive director, and, in a career of eliciting uniquely impassioned performances, those he coaxes from Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden are two of the greatest he ever got—therefore, two of the best ever recorded on film."

Roger Ebert counts it as a "Great Movie" and says it

is surely one of the most blatant psychosexual melodramas ever to disguise itself in that most commodious of genres, the Western. ... A cheap Western from Republic Pictures, yes. And also one of the boldest and most stylized films of its time, quirky, political, twisted. ... The dynamic of their investigation and their attempts to force townsfolk to testify against one another form an allegory squarely aimed at the House Un-American Activities Committee, which in 1954 was trying to force alleged communists to "name names" of other alleged communists

Time Out gives it 5 out of 5 stars, calling it a "heady, Freudian western masterpiece" and "a rip-snorting yarn". 95% of Rotten Tomatoes critics gave it positive reviews.