Alicia I love this movie so much

Aubrey Hackett While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Tobias Burrows It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Michael O'Keefe Well followed Samuel Fuller writes and directs this borderline corny sagebrush melodrama. Very apt cast with dialogue a bit sappy, but not without sexual innuendo. Barbara Stanwyck plays Jessica Drummond, a prominent landowner, with her own posse of forty hired henchmen and a theme song. (Really). With a milquetoast sheriff, Ned Logan(Dean Jagger), Drummond has made herself the law of Cochise County, Arizona. The sheriff and whole town knuckles under to her whims and demands as they thunder through the territory. A former gunslinger turned United States Marshall, Griff Bonnell(Barry Sullivan)rides into town with two of his brothers to restore law and order. Jessica becomes smitten with the new lawman, all the while he has eyes for an attractive young female gunsmith(Eve Brent).In a scene where Drummond is to be dragged down the middle of the street behind a horse, a stunt woman refuses. Miss Stanwyck, in her mid 40's, did the scene herself suffering a few minor lacerations. Also featured: John Ericson, Gene Barry, Robert Dix, Sandra Wirth and Chuck Roberson.

LeonLouisRicci One of the most independent of Directors, Sam Fuller is much more popular today among movie buffs and critics than he ever was as a working film maker. He constantly fought studio execs and was in and out of the system more than Sam Peckinpah.He often worked with low budgets but that never restrained him from delivering interesting, Avant-Gard, surreal, personal films that are most often a different take or a clear-lens look at some of the subjects that Hollywood sidestepped and ignored.This existential Western should be examined as a precursor to what was to follow in the coming decades. A distorted view of the genre that stands out among the glut of 50's TV and Big Screen Westerns. It is pulp fiction, a paperback like, sultry, lurid, in your face style that is fun, sensitive, brutal, and so direct that it is stunning. The "High-Ridin Woman with a Whip" song is so breathtakingly irritating and so intensely promiscuous that it sets the stage for what is to come. One of the most offbeat, stylish and entertaining offerings of any genre. One cannot view this one with indifference. You will notice it and remember it.

James Hitchcock "Forty Guns" effectively recycles what, even in 1957, was already a well-worn Western plot, the one about the tough but honest lawman who arrives in a small western town dominated by a powerful landowner and succeeds in restoring law and order to the community. Many such films were either straightforward retellings of the story of Wyatt Earp or fictionalised versions of the Earp legend ("Dodge City"), and this film falls into the latter category. The central character, Griff Bonnell, is clearly based on Wyatt Earp, and travels everywhere with his two brothers Wes and Chico, just as Earp was assisted by his brothers Morgan and Virgil. The one thing that sets this film apart from many treatments of a similar theme is the sex of the powerful rancher. In this film she is a woman, Jessica Drummond, and it is perhaps inevitable that she and Griff will end up by falling in love. At first, however, Jessica does not seem like a typical romantic heroine. She is a tough, ruthless lady who dominates the town and the surrounding area, ruling her territory with an iron fist and with the help of a gang of hired gunmen, the "forty guns" of the title. Griff originally arrives in the area, in fact, on a mission to arrest one of her men for mail robbery, and he soon clashes not only with Jessica but also with her spoilt, arrogant and sadistic brother Brockie. (The characterisation of Brockie Drummond is similar to that of Dave Waggoman in "The Man from Laramie", another Western of this period). The film was written and directed by Samuel Fuller. He was a director who worked in a number of genres, but I know him best for that excellent film noir, "Pickup on South Street". In some ways the plot of "Forty Guns", if updated to an American city in the mid twentieth century, with Griff as the tough-but-decent cop played by Glenn Ford, and Jessica as the glamorous but shady businesswoman played by someone like Gloria Grahame or Lizabeth Scott, could easily be that of a noir itself. The film has a complex noir-style plot and was shot in an expressionist black-and-white, even though it was made at a time when colour was increasingly becoming the norm for Westerns. (It was, however, far from being the only black-and-white Western from the late fifties; Arthur Penn's "Left Handed Gun" from the following year is another example). It also Barry Sullivan as Griff makes a rather stolid hero, but there is a good performance from Barbara Stanwyck, still strikingly glamorous and seductive in her late forties, as Jessica. (Stanwyck was five years older than Sullivan, but looks considerably younger). There is one striking scene where Jessica is dragged along the ground by a horse. I wondered how this was filmed as it seemed too dangerous for any stuntwoman to have performed, and thought that Fuller had perhaps used a dummy. The answer, in fact, is that Stanwyck performed the scene herself after her stunt double chickened out!The film was shot in CinemaScope, and Fuller uses the widescreen format to great effect. As John Ford has done earlier in films like "Rio Grande", he uses black-and-white photography as an effective medium for showing off the beauty of the Western landscapes, and as in his other films makes extensive use of close-ups. "Forty Guns" is not one of the great Westerns in the way that "Pickup on South Street" is one of the great noirs; the plot is too over-familiar and the acting is not always of the highest calibre. It is, however, a film which still retains some points of interest even today. 6/10

FightingWesterner Hard case Barbara Stanwyck is a powerful cattle baron with forty hired guns and a spoiled rotten, sleazy kid brother. Opposing her is freelance lawman Barry Sullivan and his two brothers, the youngest of which Sullivan is trying to steer away from the family business.The word I see most used by film critics to describe the films of writer/producer/director Samuel Fuller is "muscular". They're right and Forty Guns is no exception.Complex and noirish, with dreamy black and white photography, hard boiled dialog and a bit of sexual innuendo thrown in, Fuller takes pulp fiction and turns it into art, squeezing two-hours of story into a lean seventy-nine minutes.Barry Sullivan was a criminally under-used character actor. Here, he really gets to show off his acting skills in probably his best role.