There’s a reason that, seven decades after its original release, audiences and filmmakers alike are still wowed by Johnny Guitar and all its colorfully ambitious histrionics.

Ray's film is a western, but it is also an amplified melodrama, with a rich seam of deviant psychology just waiting to be disinterred from its dusty surface. Its time has come.

A cheap Western from Republic Pictures, yes. And also one of the boldest and most stylized films of its time, quirky, political, twisted.

Nicholas Ray’s gaudy masterpiece the almost “too modern for me” psychological wowser... a stylized, poetic Western like no other... Want to talk hot, burning Trucolor? Want to talk blurred gender roles? Let’s talk Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden.