Forty Guns
Forty Guns is a 1957 American Western written, produced, and directed by Samuel Fuller, starring Barbara Stanwyck as an Arizona rancher who rules a county with a private army of forty hired guns, and Barry Sullivan as the federal marshal sent to curb her power.1 Shot in black-and-white CinemaScope on a modest budget, it was dismissed at release as an over-excessive B-movie but has since been revalued as one of Fuller's most audacious films and a cult classic that influenced directors from Jean-Luc Godard to Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.2
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Release | September 1957; New York opening 27 September 19571 |
| Credits | Written, produced, and directed by Samuel Fuller; photographed by Joseph Biroc; edited by Gene Fowler Jr.; music by Harry Sukman1 |
| Format | Black-and-white CinemaScope, 2.35:1; AFI lists a duration of 76 or 79–80 minutes1 • 3 |
| Production | Produced independently by Globe Enterprises on Fox's back lot for $429,000; backgrounds filmed in Arizona, production dates 15 April to early May 19574 • 1 |
| Working title | Woman with a Whip, retained as a lyric in the theme song "High Ridin' Woman"1 • 5 |
| Censored ending | Fuller's original script had Griff shoot Jessica dead; Twentieth Century-Fox forced a change in which he wounds her and kills her brother1 |
| Reception | Positive reviews for cast and action but not a box-office performer; later hailed by Godard, who called it Fuller's best film alongside House of Bamboo4 • 6 |
Spoilers
Story and characters
Jessica Drummond (Stanwyck) is a self-made rancher who rules Cochise County, Arizona, through a forty-strong posse of hired gunfighters while protecting her lawless younger brother Brockie (John Ericson).1 Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan), an ex-gunslinger working for the U.S. Attorney General, arrives in Tombstone with his brothers Wes (Gene Barry) and Chico (Robert Dix) to arrest one of Jessica's men for mail robbery.1 The two principals find themselves at odds yet attracted to each other, and a parallel romance grows between Wes and Louvenia Spanger (Eve Brent), the gunsmith's daughter.2
The plot draws on the mythology of Wyatt Earp and the 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, with the Bonnell brothers standing in for the Earps and the Drummonds for the Clantons.7 The story runs through an ambush in Undertakers' Alley, the murder of Wes at Brockie's hand, Brockie's capture and hanging sentence, and a climax in which Brockie takes Jessica hostage and Griff deliberately shoots through her to end his ten-year record of not killing a man.1
The ending: Production
The ending. In Fuller's original version, Griff shoots and kills Jessica after Brockie takes her hostage; in later interviews and his autobiography Fuller said he wanted Griff to shoot both Brockie and Jessica dead and throw away his gun, and that Fox's marketing department insisted a picture in which the hero killed the heroine would never sell.1 • 4 The released film ends with a wounded Jessica running after Griff's wagon as he leaves town.4
Production
An independent picture at Fox. Fuller made Forty Guns in 1957 through Globe Enterprises, his own production company, in which he held a 50 percent stake and control over his productions; the film was financed and distributed by Twentieth Century-Fox for $429,000, far less than his typical outlay under studio contract, and was released in both halves of double bills.4 • 8 Backgrounds were filmed in Arizona in April and early May 1957.1
Speed of shooting. Jean-Luc Godard, writing the first French review in 1957, stated that the film was shot in black-and-white CinemaScope in under ten days.6 A Criterion supplement analysis instead credits Fuller with shooting the entire film in fifteen days; the two accounts differ and both circulate in the film's reception.9
Style
Fuller used the language of the Western to deconstruct the genre, with trademark close-ups, oblique camera angles, and staging in depth.10 The opening credits play over Stanwyck's Jessica riding at full gallop across a plain on a white horse, her forty riders behind her, and the film's theme song, "High Ridin' Woman (With a Whip)," lionizes her as a "high-ridin' woman with a whip."9 • 11
Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, in his book A Dozen Eccentric Westerns, called the film "probably the best and craziest" of Fuller's westerns and noted that it contains one of the lengthiest takes and tracking shots in Hollywood history, running over five minutes.2 A shot of the gunsmith's face framed at the end of a gun barrel was quoted by Godard in Breathless, in an homage performed by Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg.12 • 2 The dialogue is laced with sexual double entendre: as Jessica admires Griff's pistol she asks "May I feel it?", and he warns "It might go off in your face."13
Stanwyck, an accomplished horsewoman, performed the stunt in which Jessica is thrown from her horse and dragged through a dust storm herself; her stuntwoman refused to do it.9 It was the last Western of her career, in a genre she had worked in since Annie Oakley in 1935.9
Reception and legacy
At release the film received positive reviews for its cast and fast-paced action but was not a box-office performer.4 Godard's 1957 review regretted that the film would not be released in France and called it Fuller's best, comparing its daring to the extravagances of Abel Gance, Erich von Stroheim, and F.W. Murnau.6 It has since been described as a forerunner of the 1960s Spaghetti Westerns, and Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider (1985) has been noted as owing it a debt.10 The Criterion Collection released a 4K restoration on Blu-ray in 2018 as spine #954, with supplements including an interview with critic Imogen Sara Smith and Samantha Fuller's documentary A Fuller Life (2013).3
Scholarship places the film in a cycle of late 1950s Westerns, alongside Anthony Mann's The Furies (1950), in which Stanwyck plays a ranch-owning heroine whose energy demystifies a West exposed as misogynist, racist, and corrupt; in The Furies her character wins the ranch, in Forty Guns she loses it.14
References
- Forty Guns (1957), AFI Catalog of Feature Films
- Forty Guns, AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center
- Forty Guns (1957), The Criterion Collection
- Lisa Dombrowski, "Forty Guns: High-Riding Woman," The Criterion Collection (2018)
- Learning From The Masters Of Cinema: Samuel Fuller's Forty Guns, Screen Anarchy (2015)
- Forty Guns critic reviews, including Jean-Luc Godard (1957), MUBI
- Tony Williams, "Forty Guns," Senses of Cinema, Issue 37 (2005)
- Film Is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller's War Movies, Oxford University Press (preview)
- Stephen Danay, "Forty Guns," Under the Radar (2018)
- Paul Mount, "Forty Guns (1957)," Starburst Magazine
- BAM/PFA film program notes on Barbara Stanwyck (2007)
- DVD: Forty Guns, The Arts Desk
- Edinburgh Film Guild programme notes, Western Floozies (2010)
- Catherine Russell, "Forty Guns and The Furies: Angry Women," in The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck (2023)
Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Action and adventure films (individual works) › Westerns before 1980 › Released 1930 to 1960
Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026
Your notes
© 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI. Free to use with credit under the Edgepedia Community License. Developers: read Edgepedia by API or MCP. Embed a reference card.