Fuller Watch: Forty Guns (1957)

Watched:  06/01/2025

Format:  TCM forever ago, but on DVR

Viewing:  First

Director:  Sam Fuller

I'm gonna say - I've never disliked a Sam Fuller movie.  And, in fact, I like Sam Fuller movies when I watch them, and I probably need to watch more of them.

Forty Guns (1957) is a pastiche on the Wyatt Earp/ Tombstone mythos and OK Corral films, with Barry Sullivan playing the Wyatt Earp stand-in, Griff Bonnell.  The three Bonnell brothers ride into Tombstone to collect a lawman who has been robbing mail delivery.  But on their way in, they're passed by Stanwyck in all black on a white horse, and riding head of forty men - her Dragoons.  

Stanwyck's Jessica Drummond is the hard-as-nails boss of the territory, who has helped turn Arizona into something like civilization, but rules her territory with forty hired guns who ride far and wide doing her bidding while she puppet masters politicians, judges and the law.  

She has a maniacal brother, Brockie (John Ericson), who she covers for even as he causes her no small amount of trouble, this time by shooting an older lawman - who is going blind.

In some ways, this is a familiar version of the Earps and the Cowboys story from Tombstone - three brothers taking on an organized mob on the edge of civilization.  In others, it's a bit different as Griff and Jessica start to fall for each other, seeing in each other that they're the kind of people it took to build the West, but now the use for people like them is coming to a close.

Fuller movies are always grittier, tougher, more frank, and more sexy than you expect for their era.  Where some noir started resetting itself for the small screen and TV sensibilities, Fuller doubled down on what movies were trying to do with crime and harder western pictures, and was not here to provide comfort with his stories.  

SPOILERS

How many movies of 1957 feature our hero shooting his love interest through the leg to get to the gunman, and then stepping right over her? 

 Fuller, you beautiful lunatic.

Fuller is a writer first, in my book, and his dialog is always some of the sharpest, and shows a wild economy, conveying a whole story with a sentence, as Stanwyck does as she lays out her personal history to Griff.  In short, declarative sentences worthy of Hammett, she details the misery of the place, and we know what sort of person it takes to survive - let alone thrive.  

But, more than that, this film exemplifies that he knows that beneath their stoic western personas, men are roiling with emotion, both lantern-jawed hero and steely-eyed criminals.  And while women have emotions, in this film the two women take great and decisive action rather than hiding from themselves.  

While I understand the final sequence was not originally written the way it plays out - Fuller wanted Griff to shoot right through Jessica to get to Brockie - I think it's a stronger film to have Griff admitting he's not a good enough man to be the man she can forgive or he's not good enough to forget and forgive - and, yet, they do, wordlessly.  That's good stuff.  That's some of the manliest manning you're going to see in a movie, and it's all about feelings.

Stanwyck is 49 in this movie - maybe even 50.  She's still very much Barbara Stanwyck and short a Crawford or Davis, it's hard to imagine anyone else playing a woman who has built an empire and wears those years so well.  But the maturity and world-weariness is absolutely key to the role - even if implied rather than stated (Monroe apparently wanted the part but Fuller wisely wanted Stanwyck).  And, hell, she looks amazing and does a stunt where she's being dragged by a horse across chaparral.  

A read of the ending could be that she wants to throw it all away and be a wife because it's the 1950's and she's a woman - but that's maybe a lazy, first year film school reading.  The bottom line is that her time is done.  And so is that of Griff Bonnell.  And after a lifetime of struggle, of the wrong men, of doing wrong to build a world in which her legacy was built on doing wrong, she has to move on for civilization to flourish.  They don't need her or hired guns anymore.  It's poignant and whatnot.  And not all stories are designed to check off boxes in ways to make everyone happy.  And as this is Western Noir, in my book, why should anyone be happy?

Dean Jagger sure isn't.

Anyway, I dug this movie and feel like getting back to watching more Fuller movies.