“I Like My Use of Colour in It”: Nicholas Ray on the Costumes of Johnny Guitar

”Johnny Guitar”, 1954, directed by Nicholas Ray | Republic Pictures

There is a sequence in Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar where the townspeople all wear black. These are supposedly “respectable citizens” who try to defend their land from the arrival of the Eastern people and the railroad. They are all men, all except one, Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge). She is their ringleader. She wears a dress, but it’s black, too, and sober, and she has a pistol under her belt. Joan Crawford represents the threat. She is Vienna, a self-made woman, the owner of a saloon in the outskirts of the small Old West town, waiting to cash in because the railroad will pass right through her property. In this particular scene, Vienna is wearing a white gown and she is playing the piano set against a burnt orange stone wall in the background. The visual composition of this scene, alternating between Crawford all dressed in pure white and that assembly of human hypocrisy in head-to-toe black, is astonishing and even more striking than the vivid, painterly colours (the reds and yellows and blues) used by Nicholas Ray throughout the entire movie. “I like my use of colour in it”, the director revealed. “I thought that ideas such as using the black and white costumes of the posse, and so on, were… all right. All the more credit to us in that the colour process at our disposal wasn’t up to much: for example, not cover its defects, we filmed a lot of dissolves directly in camera, when the technical means at your disposal are inadequate, you always go back to the early methods of filming.”

Joan Crawford in ”Johnny Guitar”, 1954, directed by Nicholas Ray | Republic Pictures

Johnny Guitar – at its 70th anniversary this year – is a colour Western Noir, and this is just one of the elements that contribute to its uniqueness, and also why that black and white costumes sequence is so haunting. Nicholas Ray, one of the pioneer independent American filmmakers, broke down the rigid barriers of the Western genre – “I had decided to violate all the rules of the Western” – not just in the extreme stylisation of the film, but also in reversing the colour coding and especially genre archetypes, one of the very first films to do so (and to a greater extent than Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious, 1954, with Marlene Dietrich, or Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns, 1957, with Barbara Stanwyck). In Johnny Guitar, women – Vienna and Emma – assume roles previously exclusively reserved to men, while men are a little more than mere objects of desire for the two.

“I’m Clark Gable, it’s Vienna that’s gotta be the leading part,” was Joan Crawford’s demand to Nicholas Ray for making the film. He thought it was a crazy idea at first, but scriptwriter Philip Yordan, trying to keep troubles with the producers at bay, convinced Ray to accept the challenge: “She was Clark Gable, that’s all. Every time, you thought of her as a man; you don’t think of her as Joan Crawford. And that’s the way Nick directed her, very masculine.” In the book Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, Bernard Eisenschitz writes how Johnny Guitar borrows both from Casablanca and To Have and Have Not, with Curtiz’s film playing “a not inconsiderable role in the masculinization of Crawford: the action centering on a song that is taboo, the devotion of the employees in the threatened saloon, and the nocturnal meetings in the deserted establishment, make Bogart rather than Gable the model for Vienna’s character.”

We first see Vienna atop a staircase, dressed in a black buttoned-up shirt, black trousers and black leather boots (while two main male characters wear green and pink). She soon points the gun to the same group that would later return wearing black (the men of the town and Emma, or better said Emma and her posse of cowboys and lackeys whom she easily dominates). They burst into Vienna’s saloon and home, trying to put the blame of a stagecoach robbery on her. Vienna is prepared to defend herself and her property at all costs. Crawford’s bigger than life star persona and her steely look suited this raw, man’s-world role, and her red lipstick seems to be the only thread of femininity left – “I never met a woman who was more a man. She thinks like one, acts like one, and sometimes makes me fell like I’m not,” observes her croupier, Sam (Robert Osterloh) talking to her former lover, Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden). It is not however, because the delicate white dress worn later in the film in that visually staggering sequence shows she still holds on to her feminine sensitivity. She may be materialistic and mannish, but her femininity will be revealed by love.

Joan Crawford in ”Johnny Guitar”, 1954, directed by Nicholas Ray | Republic Pictures

Crawford is magnificent in her role. Strong, mannish, gun-slinging, shrewd and unapologetic about her choices and her past, she builds her character from the ground up and yet she doesn’t let you all in. She is void of sentimentality and feminine stereotypes. It’s more than a defensive mechanism, one that is closely linked to a past love and which re-enters her life, Johnny Guitar. It’s living life by her own rules. She likes being herself. “A man can lie, steal, and even kill, but as long as he hangs onto his pride, he’s still a man,” she tells Sterling Hayden’s Johnny, piercing him with her stark black eyes. “All a woman has to do is slip once and she’s a tramp.” The reason why Emma hates Vienna so much is in fact fear of what she doesn’t understand.

Vienna has another male suitor, Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady), who is also the object of interest for the other female protagonist, Emma. “He makes her feel like a woman and that scares her,” Vienna says about Emma and Dancin’ Kid. In her longest scene on screen, her speech outside, up against the tree, Mercedes McCambridge was reportedly directed by Ray to “play this all the way through – unremittingly – as the sulphuric acid that cuts through Crawford’s sweetness and light. Without any let-up.”

Nicholas Ray’s film is so twisted, and unconventional, and operatic, and political and ahead of its time, and cinematic, and theatrical, and mythical, all in one, that it’s no wonder it was met with negative opinions in America. Europe however thought differently of it and François Truffaut dedicated an ode to it: “It is dreamed, a fairy tale, a hallucinatory Western”, “the Beauty and the Beast of Westerns, a Western dream”. He concluded: “Anyone who rejects Johnny Guitar should never go to the movies again, never see any more films. Such people will never recognize inspiration, poetic intuition, or a framed picture, a shot, an idea, a good film, or even cinema itself.”

Reversing colour coding in ”Johnny Guitar”, 1954, directed by Nicholas Ray | Republic Pictures

Note: This article was originally published in 2019 and has now been revised on the occasion of the film’s 70th anniversary this year.