Adventure in Sahara (1938)

The Samuel Fuller Collection DVD boxed set is a bit of a misnomer. Several of these movies can’t really be described as Sam Fuller movies. They’re movies released by Columbia with a Sam Fuller connection, but that’s not quite the same thing. Adventure in Sahara, dating from 1938, was based on an original story by Fuller but that’s the extent of his contribution.

This is a fairly standard Foreign Legion adventure. Even in 1938 the cruel sadistic Foreign Legion officer who drives his men to mutiny was a rather tired cliché.



In this case the cruel sadistic officer is Captain Savatt (C. Henry Gordon). When American aviator Jim Wilson (Paul Kelly) receives word that his brother Robert is dead, he decides he wants to meet this Captain Savatt. His brother had enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and his letters had suggested to Jim that Captain Savatt’s brutal discipline had been the cause of Robert’s death. So Jim now enlists in the Foreign Legion and requests that he be sent to the unit commanded by Captain Savatt.

Captain Savatt’s command is Fort Agadez, a remote outpost in the Sahara Desert. Jim soon discovers that Savatt is more than just a brutal disciplinarian. He is a sadist who enjoys hounding men to their death. Eventually the men cannot take this treatment any longer. They propose to mutiny, and they have selected Jim Wilson to lead the mutiny.



The situation is complicated for Jim by the presence of his girlfriend Carla (Lorna Gray) at Fort Agadez. Carla is also a flyer and she had set out to look for Jim. Her plane came down near the fort and she is now Captain Savatt’s guest. Carla doesn’t understand why Jim would be leading a mutiny and she doesn’t like it.

Also unhappy is Lieutenant Dumond (Robert Fiske). Dumond is a good officer and he is also a humane man. The men have no quarrel with Dumond but when the mutiny breaks out he feels that his duty compels him to oppose it. Nobody, least of all Jim Wilson, wants to harm Dumond but they don’t really know what to do with him.



Jim had come up with an ingenious plan for disposing of Savatt in such a way that it would appear that Savatt and the men loyal to him had been killed by the Arabs. Savatt and his loyal troops are given one bullet each and enough food to get them well clear of the fort, but not enough food to allow them to reach the nearest outpost. But is a man like Savatt going to be so easy to kill? Whatever his faults Savatt is a brave man of iron determination and he has no intention of perishing in the desert. He intends to survive and to take his revenge on the mutineers.

The characterisation in this movie is pretty simplistic. Savatt is a cardboard cut-out villain while Jim Wilson is the brave noble hero. C. Henry Gordon manages to make Savatt a memorable figure even if he can’t give him any great complexity. Paul Kelly is unable to make Jim Wilson much more than a clichéd and slightly dull hero. The other characters in the movie are divided into equally simplistic categories of good guys and bad guys. Dwight Frye probably could have made Gravett, Savatt’s loyal informer among the men, into something interesting but he isn’t given sufficient screen time.



Director D. Ross Lederman churned out enormous numbers of B features. His one great virtue as a director was his ability to keep within limited budgets and tight shooting schedules. He was typical of the directors who spend their whole Hollywood careers turning out unambitious but solid B-movies. Unambitious and solid seems like a fair way of describing this movie.

It’s impossible to say to what extent Maxwell Shane’s screenplay reflects Fuller’s original story. The story was in any case early Fuller, before he developed his much more colourful and much more intense mature style.

The DVD offers us a very good print of this largely forgotten movie. em>Adventure in Sahara
is a harmless time-waster. If you buy the Sam Fuller boxed set you’ll buy it for other more notable movies but there’s no reason not to give this one a spin.

Underworld USA (1961)

On the surface Samuel Fuller’s 1961 gangster film Underworld USA is fairly conventional for a Sam Fuller movie. It’s much less bizarre and over-the-top than Forty Guns (1957) or Shock Corridor (1963) or The Naked Kiss (1964). But once you start looking carefully you can see that in its own much more subtle way it is, like all of Sam Fuller’s movies, very individual and quite unlike the usual run of Hollywood gangster movies, or Hollywood movies in general.

The difference lies not in the plot, which is a relatively straightforward revenge plot. The difference is in the style, and in the mood.

The style is very stripped down and direct. Fuller believed movies should be direct and forceful, and this one certainly qualifies. It’s not that it’s particularly violent, it’s more that the violence comes through not just in the action but in the cutting, in the way Fuller composes his shots, in the way that the violence just hits you when you’re not expecting it.

The mood is intense and obsessive to an extreme. In some ways it’s more like a revenge western than a revenge crime film, in the sense that this is a movie about a man who has absolutely nothing in him except for the thirst for revenge.



When the movie opens Tolly Devlin is a 14-year-old juvenile delinquent. In theory he’s being brought up by his father; in practice he’s being raised by Sandy (Beatrice Kay). Sandy runs a bar. She’s what could best be described as a rough diamond. She’s outwardly tough and world-weary but inside she’s as sentimental as they come and she loves Tolly as if he were her own son.

Then comes the crucial moment in Tolly’s life. He and Sandy see a man being beaten to death in an alleyway behind Sandy’s bar. We don’t actually see this event - all we see are shadows on a wall, and we assume that’s what Sandy and Tolly see. After it’s over they discover that the man being beaten was Tolly’s father, and that he’s dead. At that point Tolly makes the decision to devote the rest of his life to avenging his father. The irony of course is that Tolly’s father was a worthless two-bit hoodlum, but to Tolly he was a god.



Tolly has one clue - he recognised one of the men who killed his father. We then jump forward more than a decade. Tolly is now a burglar, and not a very successful one since he’s about to go inside for the third time in his comparatively short life. And now fate gives him what he wanted. The man he recognised as one of his father’s killers is an inmate in the same prison, dying of congestive heart failure. Before he dies Tolly tricks him into revealing the names of his three accomplices.

By the time Tolly is released these three men are now very big wheels indeed in organised crime. In fact there is only one man senior to them in the whole Syndicate hierarchy. They control the three most important criminal activities in the Syndicate’s operations - Gela controls narcotics, Gunther controls the labour unions and Smith runs prostitution. Of course there is no way that a small-time burglar like Tolly could ever get anywhere near such titans of organised crime, but this is where the movie also resembles a western - the hero seeking revenge wants to get the men who killed his father and fate arranges it so that he finds himself in a position to do so. By the standards of a normal crime movie it’s completely absurd that Tolly could get close to these three men within a very short space of time, but this is a Sam Fuller movie so logic is much less important than that the plot should allow Tolly his chance.



In the course of tracking these killers he rescues a female hooker and junkie from a cold-blooded hitman named Gus (Richard Rust) who was about to kill her. He and Sandy more or less adopt the woman, who goes by the name of Cuddles (Dolores Dorn). She is another element in the movie that makes me think of this movie as a western, with the hardbitten hero adopting an orphan kid except that in this case she’s a good-natured whore.

Cliff Robertson plays Tolly as an adult and he brings just the right touch of intense obsession. It’s exactly the sort of performance Fuller would have wanted and it works. Richard Rust almost steals the picture as one of the most chilling hitmen in movie history. He’s the sort of one-dimensional obsessive vicious killer that you’d expect to find as the evil gunslinger in a western. He has no personality, he simply exists to kill, but somehow Rust makes this character very memorable indeed.



Not one of the characters has any depth. They are not people so much as representations of particular ideas or states of mind. Fuller could quite easily have dispensed with giving the characters names and just called Tolly the Avenger, Gus the Killer, Cuddles the Girl and the crimes bosses Crime Boss #1, Crime Boss #2, etc. In an ordinary movie this one-dimensionality of characterisation would have been a serious weakness but it would have worked well in a spaghetti western (think Clint Eastwood as The Man With No Name) and it works for Fuller. It works for Fuller because he’s not interested in giving us characterisation - he wants each character to simply represent one single idea.

In his introduction to the DVD Martin Scorcese compares this movie to the movies of the French New Wave, and there is perhaps something in that. It does have the kind of minimalist staccato feel of very early Godard and it’s not altogether surprising that Godard admired Fuller so much.



This is the sort of movie where you could more or less ignore the plot and just enjoy the style. Scorcese makes the claim that Fuller’s movies were becoming almost abstract at this time, and it’s a valid point.

Underworld USA forms part of Columbia’s Samuel Fuller Collection and is perhaps the strongest movie in that set, certainly vastly superior to the bitterly disappointing The Crimson Kimono. The transfer is 16x9 enhanced and is superb. Scorcese’s brief but excellent introduction is the only extra included.

Underworld USA is a must-see for Sam Fuller fans.

The Crimson Kimono (1959)

The Crimson Kimono is a 1959 crime thriller written, produced and directed by Sam Fuller. It tries to be more than just a crime thriller, but it turns out to be one of his few failures.

Detective-Sergeant Charlie Bancroft (Glenn Corbett) and Detective Joe Kojaku (James Shigeta) are LA cops investigating the murder of stripper Sugar Torch. The investigation will take them into the heart of the Japanese section of Los Angeles. One of the key witnesses in the case is artist Chris Downs (Victoria Shaw). Both Charlie and Joe fall in love with her. She chooses Joe, which causes major problems between Charlie and Joe.



That’s pretty much it for the plot. Fuller gets so involved in the drama between Charlie and Joe that the crime thriller part of the movie gets pushed to one side. As a result the movie is more a social problem movie than a crime movie. And if there’s one thing I despise it’s Hollywood social problem movies. They’re almost always heavy-handed and cringe-inducingly earnest and this is no exception.

Fuller fails to generate any real excitement from the crime plot. He even fails (most unusually) to generate much visual interest. The two chase sequences that bookend the film are the only entertaining moments in the entire film. The opening sequence is vintage Fuller, which makes the rest of the movie seem even more disappointing.



Glenn Corbett is reasonably effective as Charlie. James Shigeta’s Joe comes across as self-pitying and self-centred, which is perhaps more the fault of the script than the fault of the actor. Victoria Shaw is dull as the girl they both love, Chris. The only really interesting character is Mac, a middle-aged artist who ends up having just about all the other characters crying on her shoulder. Anna Lee was a fine actress and she manages to make the dialogue sparkle in a way that the other actors fail to do.

The settings are fairly interesting, offering plenty of glimpses of Japanese-American culture. 

Fuller’s script is excessively talky. Fuller had a gift for dialogue but even taking that into account I found myself wishing the characters would stop talking and do something.



Sam Leavitt’s cinematography is impressive but he doesn’t really get enough chances to show what he can really do.

I never thought I’d say this about a Sam Fuller movie, but this is a dull movie. Even with its short 82-minute running time it drags. Fuller really needed to give a lot more attention to the main crime plot, which was something he was good at, rather than getting bogged down in socially conscious melodrama, something he was not good at. The clumsy, corny, contrived ending doesn’t help matters.



This movie is included in the Sam Fuller Collection boxed set, in a reasonably good 16x9 enhanced widescreen print. The black-and-white picture is generally good although grainy at times. A short documentary is included on the disc.

Unless you’re a Sam Fuller completist (or you really dote on Hollywood social problem movies) I’d suggest giving this one a miss.

Scandal Sheet (1952)

Scandal Sheet is included in the Columbia Samuel Fuller Collection but Fuller himself was not actively involved in the making of the film. He did however write the novel on which the film was based.

The novel was The Dark Page, published in 1944 while Fuller was serving in the armed forces. The novel was a bestseller and an award-winner and established him as an important pulp writer. Howard Hawks had bought the screen rights to the book but it did not get made until 1952, under the title Scandal Sheet, with Phil Karlson directing. It would have been fascinating to see what Hawks would have done with this story but Karlson does a fine job.

It’s both a classic newspaper story and a classic murder story. It’s a suspense story rather than a mystery - the audience knows the identity of the killer right from the start, but the other characters don’t. It doesn’t just rely on suspense; it’s also a psychological study of two men whose fates and interlinked in an unexpected way.



Mark Chapman (Broderick Crawford) is the editor of the New York Express. It was once a quality newspaper with a modest circulation. The paper hadn’t shown a profit for years. Under Chapman’s editorial direction the Express has become a trashy scandal sheet with a huge circulation. The owners have promised him a huge bonus if he can lift the circulation above 750,000, a figure that would have seemed an impossible dream when Chapman took over the paper but that now seems eminently achievable. Thee is a delicious little irony in the way that Chapman finally breaks the 750,000 barrier.

Steve McCleary (John Derek) is a young and very ambitious hotshot crime reporter. He’s Chapman’s protégé. Such emotional feelings that Chapman has (and he has few enough of those) are centred on McCleary. There’s a lot of Sam Fuller in McCleary - Fuller became a hotshot crime reporter himself at the age of 17.



Julie Allison (Donna Reed) had worked on the paper before Chapman took over. She doesn’t approve of Chapman’s editorial style but she has a long-term contract with the paper and he can’t fire her. She likes McCleary but she doesn’t approve of his approach to the job either. McCleary is obviously in love with her but is too busy proving himself as a reporter to realise how strong his own feelings are.

Chapman is on top of the world until the evening of the New York Express Lonely Hearts Club ball, a cynical and cruel circulation-boosting stunt. Then his past comes back to haunt him in a big way.



It’s impossible to discuss this movie in any depth without revealing at least something of the plot. There will be some spoilers in the next couple of paragraphs but they’re not major. I won’t be evealing anything the audience doesn’t know within the first half of the movie, and I certainly won’t be revealing the powerful and effective ending.

One of the lonely hearts at the ball is Chapman’s wife Charlotte (Rosemary DeCamp). He deserted her twenty years earlier. His name was George Grant then. He meets her at her run-down apartment, they argue, and she threatens to reveal his own private scandal to a rival newspaper. They struggle, and she is killed. He does a reasonably successful job of making it look like an accident, but not good enough to fool McCleary. He has taught McCleary too well. McCleary knows it’s murder and he’s determined to find the murderer. His tragedy is that he doesn’t know that the man he is hunting is the man he most admires in all the world. Chapman’s problem is that he has to encourage McCleary; to do anything else would arouse suspicion. The Express’s biggest story ever will be the hunt for George Grant.



It’s the sort of story Fuller liked. Chapman and McCleary are like father and son but McCleary will not rest until he finds the murderer. In another irony, a drunken bum who had once been a Pulitzer Prize-winning star reporter for the Express, a man Chapman once admired (Charlie Barnes, played by Henry O’Neill), finds himself in possession of the most vital clue in the case. 

End of mild spoilers.

Broderick Crawford is superb. He’s a single-minded ruthless man but he cannot escape his own past. John Derek is very  good as McCleary who is esentially a younger of Mark Chapma. Donna Reed and Henry O’Neill provide fine support while Harry Morgan has fun as a hardbitten press photographer.



There are those who think this movie would have been even better had Fuller directed it himself. That may be so, but it’s being a trifle harsh on Phil Karlson. Karlson was a pro and this is the sort of material he relished. He doesn’t put a foot wrong. The movie as it stands is a very fine newspaper film noir with some great twists that do more than just create suspense; they create a powerful and moving psychological dynamic. This is a great little movie that deserves to be better known. Highly recommended.

The DVD presentation is flawless and includes a documentary on Fuller.

Pickup on South Street (1953)

Writer-director Samuel Fuller’s 1953 film Pickup on South Street is not a straightforward film noir, but then very few of Sam Fuller’s movies could be described as straightforward. It’s also neither a straightforward crime film nor a straightforward spy thriller but it has affinities with all these genres.

It opens with a visual tour-de-force, a lengthy dialogue-free sequence of a pickpocket robbing a woman on a New York subway. This is picking pockets as a kind of seduction. It has a disturbing twisted eroticism to it that sets the mood for the rest of the film.

Pickpocket Skip McCoy gets more than he bargained for. The woman’s purse contained a microfilm. The microfilm contains US military secrets. The woman, Candy (Jean Peters), is acting as a courier for her ex-boyfriend Joey (Richard Kiley). She thinks he’s involved in industrial espionage but in fact he’s a communist agent. Without the microfilm Joey will be in big trouble with his spymaster bosses.



Joey and Candy now have to find the pickpocket to get the microfilm back while the police and the FBI have to find both the microfilm and the spymaster, and in order to do that they have to find the pickpocket. These parallel chases lead them all to professional stool pigeon Moe (Thelma Ritter in an Oscar-nominated performance). Skip knows Moe is a stoolie but he doesn’t hold it against her. As far as he is concerned it’s no more immoral than being a pickpocket - it’s just a living. He’s actually quite fond of her.

Candy’s position is more complex. Joey has manipulated her and she resents it and while she’s quite relaxed about being involved in criminal activities she draws the line at treason. And she’s strangely attracted to Skip. At first it’s pure lust (all the scenes between them have an intense erotic charge) but it soon develops into something deeper. She is torn between conflicting loyalties.



The usual template for film noir is that a basically decent guy finds himself drawn into the film noir universe of corruption and damnation, and then has to struggle desperately to save himself. His downfall generally comes about because he has a weakness, or because there’s a small seed of corruption within him.

This movie offers a twist. We have a basically corrupt guy who finds himself drawn, reluctantly, into the daylight world. This happens because here’s a small seed of decency within him. He still has to struggle desperately to save himself, but he has a better chance of redemption. Of course the redemption may come at the price of his death.



The means by which this happens is the same as in the classic noir template - a woman. She also follows a variation on the classic femme fatale pattern. She tempts him with things he’s never experienced before - loyalty and love. She wants to save him. Like most women who want to save men she’s picked a loser but maybe this time it will work out. There’s not much decency within him but there is a tiny spark buried deep down inside.

She’s also looking for redemption. She’s picked losers before and it’s worked out disastrously and she’s been drawn into that film noir universe herself. In fact her story follows the classic noir pattern more closely than Skip’s. She really is basically decent but she’s been involved with a male version of the femme fatale, a homme fatale if you will, in the person of Joey. He has corrupted her and she is fighting against it.



Richard Widmark is a bit of a noir icon but I find his early performances irritating. They’re all mannerisms and twitchiness and the characterisation is too obvious. By 1953 he was a much more experienced actor and he’s toned things down. He still conveys that sense of a spring that’s been wound too tightly but now he’s in control of the performance. It’s a difficult role because his change of heart has to be convincing, not just a plot contrivance. It works because Fuller’s script provides a believable motivation. Actually two believable motivations, one involving Moe and one involving Candy. Jean Peters is also impressive.

The most amusing thing about this movie is reading some of the online reviews and watching the way the reviewers twist themselves into knots trying to turn it into something they can approve of - a film that is subversive and transgressive and anti-American. Some even manage to convince themselves that the movie is really depicting the police and the FBI and the US government as the bad guys. They’re utterly unconcerned by the fact that there is nothing in the film to support such an interpretation. They believe the line that has been pushed by the film school types that a movie can only be worthwhile if it’s subversive and transgressive and attacks the American Dream.

To the extent that Fuller’s films are subversive they’re subversive in a way such people could never comprehend. They’re stylistically subversive, not politically subversive.



In fact this movie is completely apolitical in any conventional sense. The microfilm is a McGuffin. Communism is used as a metaphor for corruption - the communist agents are evil because they use lies, manipulation and violence to control people. They differ from the straightforward criminals only in being more ruthless and more dishonest. Skip has always been a thief and Moe has always been a stool pigeon but at least they’ve never claimed to be anything else. There are degrees of corruption. Skip and Candy can only save themselves from the noir nightmare world by learning to trust and to be honest with each other, by leaving the world of lies and manipulation.

Skip, Candy and Moe are all outsiders but Fuller avoids glamourising their outsider status. While they’re all complex and to some extent sympathetic characters the criminal underworld is petty and sordid. To survive they will need to escape from that world. All are given a chance of redemption but whether they will achieve it is by no means certain.

A fascinating and stylish, and emotionally multi-layered, movie by one of the most individualistic and eccentric of all American film-makers. Highly recommended.

House of Bamboo (1955)

The first thing you need to remind yourself when watching House of Bamboo is that this is a Sam Fuller movie. So if you’re going to get all bent out of shape over things like incoherent or downright plotting then you should hit the Eject button straight away and watch something else.

While superficially this might seem like a straightforward crime film on closer viewing it’s as gloriously and deliriously crazed as his monumentally weird early 60s films like The Naked Kiss and Shock Corridor. It’s difficult to justify regarding this one as a film noir but any Sam Fuller movie is going to be of interest to noir fans.



This was a fairly lavish 20th Century-Fox production that features generous use of Japanese locations. Made in 1954 it marked the beginning of Hollywood’s fascination with Japanese culture. It’s hard to think of any movie that makes better or more effective use of exotic locations than this one. It’s also difficult to think of any movie that uses the CInemascope screen to better effect. Combined with stunning colour cinematography the result is a visually spectacular film.

Fuller clearly loved traditional Japanese houses and used the rice-paper screens very cleverly to construct some wonderfully dramatic visual moments. The shot that introduces Robert Ryan is pure genius.



In any case, let’s look at the plot. Japan is still under US military occupation. A munitions train is robbed and a US Army sergeant is killed. This brings the case into the province of the US Army Military Police who are cooperating with the Japanese police in the investigation. One member of the gang is seriously wounded and later dies in hospital.

The gang behind the robbery is comprised entirely of Americans, all ex-GIs. The leader of the gang, Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan), runs their criminal operations like military campaigns. He controls most of the pachinko parlours in Tokyo but his real enthusiasm is for armed robberies. You have to overlook the fact that it’s extremely unlikely that a group of westerners, none of who apparently speaks Japanese, could possibly run such a successful criminal enterprise in such an insular society. And it’s even more unlikely that the yakuza would allow such a gang to operate. This brings us back to plotting and it’s really best not to think about this subject at all.



Meanwhile a scruffy American two-bit hoodlum has arrived in Tokyo. His name is Eddie Spanier (Robert Stack) and he’s looking for an old army buddy who had married a Japanese woman. This old pal was in fact the member of the gang killed in the train robbery. He tracks down his buddy’s widow, a woman named Mariko (Shirley Yamaguchi). Eddie is trying to set himself up in the protection racket, targeting the pachinko parlours, This brings him to the attention of Sandy Dawson, which was of course Eddie’s intention. Eddie is no hoodlum, he’s a US Army military policeman. Operating undercover is going to be a dangerous business but Mariko offers to move in with him and help him. She becomes what the gang members refer to as Eddie’s kimono, his woman. They don’t actually share a bed but it’s obvious that what started as a business arrangement is becoming a real emotional involvement.

Eddie has managed to gain a foothold in the gang and becomes something of a protégé of Sandy’s but he faces two major problems. Sandy has a strict rule that any gang member wounded in a robbery will be immediately killed. He doesn’t believe in allowing prisoners to fall into the hands of the police. The other problem is that Sandy is quite mad. It’s a quiet contained madness which makes it all the more disturbing. Sandy is the ultimate control freak. You know that if he ever explodes it’s going to be very very messy.



Much criticism of this film has centred on the supposedly homoerotic overtones of the Sandy-Eddie relationship. There’s certainly some subtext here and it’s reinforced by Robert Ryan’s intense but claustrophobic performance. Most of the relationships in the movie are problematic, the Eddie-Mariko romance because of almost insurmountable cultural obstacles and in fact of course all of the western characters in the movie are outsiders (often in multiple ways) and destined to remain so.

The scene in which Sandy angrily accuses Mariko of betraying Eddie could be read as demonstrating their romantic rivalry for Eddie’s affections. I don’t see it that way. To me it seems that Sandy has tried to create an artificial imaginary family, a family that he believes he can control completely. Sandy wants control, rather than sex or love. The homoerotic element may in fact be a red herring.



Not everyone likes Robert Stack’s performance but I think it works perfectly. He’s meant to be a blundering outsider and that’s how he comes across. His clumsiness and also makes the Eddie-Mariko romance rather poignant and emphasises the difficulty involved in crossing the cultural gulf between them. Robert Ryan was born to play roles like Sandy and gives one of his best and most subtly twisted performances.

The real reasons to see this movie though are for the gorgeous cinematography and the succession of superb and imaginative visual set-pieces that Fuller constructs. The climactic scene on the rooftop fairground is a tour-de-force of sheer cinematic style. The fact that it’s a children’s playground that he’s trapped in rather nicely mocks Sandy’s desperate desire for control.

And it’s a wonderfully entertaining movie whether it makes sense or not.

This is a movie that absolutely must be seen in the correct aspect ratio. Fortunately it’s available on both Region 1 and Region 2 DVD. The R2 DVD from Optimum looks terrific.

Forty Guns (1957)

Sam Fuller’s 1957 offering Forty Guns may not be the oddest western ever made but it must come close. It’s an outrageous triumph of stye over substance and I loved every minute of it.

The outrageousness is established right from the opening scene. Famed gunslinger-turned-lawman Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan) and his brother Wes (Gene Barry) are riding into town on a buckboard when they encounter Jessica Drummond and her dragoons in a spectacular sequence that demonstrates Fuller’s mastery of the Cinemascope screen. Jessica (Barbara Stawnwyck) is the boss of Cochise County and her forty dragoons are her forty hired guns. Given that this movie is awash with sexual innuendo we’re bound to speculate that the dragoons might also form Jessica’s private harem. Yes, this movie is that outrageous.

Griff has come to serve a warrant on one of Jessica’s men, but before he has a chance to do so he encounters Jessica’s no-good brother Brock terrorising the town’s blind city marshall. When Griff gets around to calling on Jessica it’s clear there is an attraction between them, but the issue of Brock and his increasingly violent and out-of-control behaviour seems destined to keep them apart.

Jessica Drummond owns just about everyone who matters in the territory - judges, politicians, the governor, the county’s sheriff. The sheriff, Logan (Dean Jagger), is a weak man who nurses a hopeless passion for the formidable matriarch of Cochise County.

The plot is mostly a collection of familiar western themes but it’s not the plot that matters, it’s Fuller’s over-the-top treatment of the material and his stylistic excesses. Fuller uses the Cinemascope framing in spectacular fashion, and there re more fancy camera angles than you’ve ever seen in one movie. That sort of thing can be cheap and gimmicky but Fuller does it with enough visual wit to get away with it.

There’s a memorable scene in which Wes Bonnell admires his lady love (who happens to be a gunsmith) through a gun barrel. It’s typical of the risque humour that permeates the film. The scene in Jessica’s house with all forty of her dragoons seated at the immensely long dining table and all accommodated within the shot is a fine example of Fuller using what might have been dismissed as visual gimmickry to tell us all we need to know about the power dynamics between Jessica and her minions.

And Fuller tells us all e need to know about the feelings between Jessica and Griff by putting them in the middle of a tornado. It’s over-the-top but it works.

Even stranger are the musical interludes! Including the song about the high-ridin’ woman with a whip. They add an an almost surreal element to an already wildly eccentric movie. When it comes to the important scenes such as the climactic gunfight though Fuller is in complete control. It’s one of the best scenes of its type you’ll ever see, visually brilliant and full of black humour.

Stanwyck is superb. She was clearly enjoying herself and did all her own stunts including a frighteningly dangerous scene where she’s dragged behind a horse in the middle of a tornado. The supporting cast is generally good. Barry Sullivan has the right kind of masculine presence to perfectly complement Stanwyck’s matriarchal dominatrix. Gene Barry mixes charm and likeability and serves to lighten things up a little. John Ericson does everything but foam at the mouth as Brock but in a movie like this it’s a perfectly valid acting approach.

Forty Guns makes the supposedly revolutionary revisionist westerns of the 70s seem boringly conventional and staid. Fuller gives us an extravagant idiosyncratic but highly entertaining view of the wild west. This is a must-see western.

The region 4 DVD is bereft of extras but at least it preserves the correct Cinemascope framing and it looks pretty good.