Forty Guns

Possessed of a gun-crazy sting all its own, Fuller's near-legendary B Western still excites dazed amazement and still resists critical shorthand. As an explicitly sexual range-war yarn, you'd automatically dub it a Freudian Western, except that the good doctor's shade could never cope with dreams like Fuller's: vivid, abstract, brutal affairs of naked emotion and violence. So you're left cataloguing the movie's startlingly pleasurable elements - the daring, darting camera style; the keynote performances from Stanwyck as a sensual autocrat and Sullivan as a tired, Earp-like killer; the radical jettisoning of comfortable myth - until you happily concede that essences are irreducible. And this is the essence of American action cinema. Just watch, and be stunned speechless yourself.