There’s a scene in Forty Guns where the protagonist Griff (Barry Sullivan), finding himself in the middle of an impromptu high noon standoff, chooses not to draw his gun but instead to walk straight up to his antagonist and paralyze him in his tracks. As filmed by renegade writer-director Samuel Fuller, it’s not a beautifying celebration, a poetic coalition between gunslinger and camera-wielder, but a sudden invasion by a force that is too big, too insoluble, for the film screen to contain. He is assaulting the distance between camera and audience, and turning us to stone. This is a man who, with just his eyes, visualized so menacingly and brutally in pulverizing Cinemascope that he achieves a kind of Leone-esque abstract menace, not only commands the screen but exceeds it, cannot be contained in it, tries to rupture it with the sheer charisma of his uncontainability.

Fuller directs the way Griff walks. His style is both brazenly minimalist and bracingly direct, willing to state everything it needs to and never desiring to say more. At one point, a trial is initiated and concluded all within a single shot, a tacit admission of the limitations of the judicial system on the frontier conveyed, a visual travesty of justice that the film needs no other scenes to explain. Fuller gets right to the point here, while also arguing, with withering, savage grace, that the point has very much been avoided.

Conversely, in an earlier moment, Fuller casually lingers with two men who reminisce in a general store, holding on them as they lazily move forward and then back to their original starting point while weaving around a conversation neither of theme knows how to pinpoint. This is a circular scene, one that suggests that many of the most beautiful, but also troubling, sequences of life end right where they start, rather than advancing us forward. People certainly have conversations like this, but when do you see it in a film? The film’s thesis is that this matters more than the conflict itself, that life is found in the slow pauses and the forgotten moments that the full force of the world is dedicated to getting in the way of. The trial, in one sense, is smashed into a thirty second gestalt in order to provide room for scenes like this. And yet, Fuller also suggests that, given the limits of the world – the forces at play beyond the characters in any given scene – to only focus on the general store sequence would be myopic. The trial, or lack thereof, needs dealing with.

And thus kick in the plot must. Griff is in town with his brothers Wes (Gene Barry) and Chico (Robert Dix), with a warrant for the arrest of Howard Swain (Chuck Roberson), who just so happens to be one of the forty hired guns of Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck), who runs the town with a passive brutality that suggests she could lay down the law if she so chooses to. Indeed, she doesn’t have to: without the film having to say anything, we know that she is the author of the thirty second courtroom sequence, the editor of a justice system rigged in her favor. She also allows her brother Brockie (John Ericson) free range over the town, much to the detriment of everyone else in the film, and often to her.

You’ll note, reader, that I’ve said “Barbara Stanwyck,” and she’s absolutely phenomenal in a role that feels like it was designed for her. Acting after her prime but before her resurgence as a wounded Grand Dame of the camp world, she delivers a portrait of an embattled, empowered woman in a film that is populated by splintery male types and dialogue that gleefully itches at the scabs of masculine certitude and quietly tears gender binaries to tatters. Speaking on a young woman who works with her hands as a gunsmith, a man remarks “she even looks good in overalls, built like a 40-40, I’d like to stay around long enough to clean her rifle.” When kissing, a character asks “any recoil?” And, in a quietly charged pas de deux that I have no idea how they snuck past the censors, when Griff confronts Stanwyck’s Jessica discussing his gun, she asks him if she “can … feel it.” His stone-faced retort, “it might go off in your face,” is so suggestive that it doesn’t even require a facial expression to intrigue and worry us in equal measure.

We see in that scene that Stanwyck’s Jessica is a sexual being, a collection of forces and sensations doggedly strung together by an iron will afraid that a display of openness might unleash her force on the world, or allow other forces to unleash themselves on her. This is not what celebrants of tough-talking Old Western cinema tend to call a “Hawksian woman,” referring to Howard Hawks’ penchant for sure-firing, agentive beacons of a world liberated from the gender hierarchies of the “civilized” world. Jessica is a cruel creature, but also a fragile person, equal not because she is equally competent but because everyone in Fuller’s world is equally incompetent to the pressures arrayed against them, and flowing with them. She’s too human, and too thorny, to be a figurehead for any framework, but her presence, like the female gunsmith, casually suggests that the weapons that men wield here, the structures they aspire to master with apparent ease, are actually constructed, and deconstructable, by women.

In Fuller’s late-classic Hollywood Western, then, the prairie is not an open field where arcane forces are tapped for and transmuted into a man’s playground but, rather, a liminal realm of shadowy conflict besieging an inert, brittle masculinity. Westerns since, and even before, have undercut America’s mythology of masculine self-control, but they seldom prick the air out of the genre with Fuller’s brusque ear for casually brutal dialogue or, perhaps more importantly, his simply ravishing eye for a widescreen canvas that seems to topple the characters’ supremacy in the frame. Fuller and cinematographer Joseph Biroc mutate the extra-wide Cinemascope frame, elsewhere almost always weaponized as a blanket to bathe Hollywood Western grandeur in a sacralizing glow, into an exceedingly cramped canvas that condemns the characters by dwarfing and trapping their own egos. No one can lay in mythic repose in this space without being flattened. Suddenly, it seems, the man who boldly walks right up to the camera, discussed earlier, is not a steadfast avatar of supreme competence but just another guy who, in the act of asserting himself onto the camera, is turned into an abstraction, an image we can’t even really recognize as a human at all.

Forty Guns is like that. Even when Fuller superficially seems to be indulging the genre’s penchant for ravishing poetics and boastful glory, he manages to turn a seemingly casual sweep across a simple story into a nervous tangle. The opening, Drummond’s trail of armed goons spreading across the desert like a dust cloud, is the only visual showpiece of transparently mythopoetic proportions in the film. However, Fuller shoots the scene not as a faithful worshipper basking in a sublime vista but as a hesitant observer of a deeply uncertain, amoral force. The camera even hides beneath a carriage at one point to escape the men who trample the frame. Fuller invites us to witness an imposing space of pure might, a region of American lore that lionizes the mind that traverses it with gun or with camera, but what he finally suggests is both the dubious virility of the guns, wielded by man or woman, that would claim the land by force and the impotence of the camera that would obsess over that force.

Score: 9/10