I counted forty one.....liars....

While generally well-regarded, Sam Fuller's Forty Guns doesn't really work for me. This is an O.K. Corral remix party where Barbara Stanwyck essentially plays Pa Clanton and falls in love with Wyatt Earp, but the pacing is off. At first, she's more a force of nature than a character, galloping through the screen with forty men in tow like it's a visual gag. The middle of the film develops her, but the heroes are definitely the Bonell Brothers who get deputized almost as soon as they walk into Tombstone. Flirtations with a female gunsmith actually lead to a different brother getting married, and no lie, I had trouble distinguishing the two elder brothers from one another, which was kind of confusing. In any case, any feminist good will the film garners from me with its casting is all shot by the end when Stanwyck of course has to choose her rather one-sided love over being a rich, connected rancher. I like how Barry Sullivan isn't interested in her for moral reasons, but Hollywood must Hollywood. Fuller's Noir credentials are strong, and he does provide some dark moments and a lot of witty dialog mixing gun violence and double entendre, but I'd have much rather been in Stanwyck's perspective from the onset, as her situation is more interesting than Yet Another Gunslinger's (TM).

I can see why Scorsese likes it. An awesome movie + wonderful soundtrack/score.

She’s a high ridin’ woman with a whip,
She’s a woman that all men desire,
But there’s no man can tame her
That’s why they name her
The high ridin’ woman with a whip.

She commands and men obey
They’re just putty in her hands, so they say,
When she rides and the wind is in her hair,
She has eyes full of life, full of fire.

But if someone could break her
And take her whip away,
Someone big, someone strong, someone tall,
You may find that the woman with a whip
Is only a woman after all.