“The Lusty Men” (1952)
“They Live By Night,” “”In A Lonely Place,” “Johnny Guitar,” “Rebel Without A Cause” —Ray was nothing if not good at picking titles. But the finest might have been “The Lusty Men,” and fortunately, the film is almost as good as its name. Adapted from a novel by Claude Stanush (who Richard Linklater would go on to draw from for “The Newton Boys”), it’s a big, heart-bruised melodrama that sees Robert Mitchum’s broken rodeo rider Jeff McCloud attempting to retire from the game. He befriends Wes (Arthur Kennedy), who with his wife Louise (Susan Hayward) is attempting to save money to buy Jeff’s old childhood home, and agrees to train the younger man in his sport. But the better Wes gets and the more he falls in love with the world, the more Louise drifts from him. One could dismiss the story as thin and formulaic even for its time, but the almost documentary-like eye for detail that Ray often brings, deglamorizing the rodeo even as the title valorizes it (the bull-riding sequences are short, sharp bursts of violence surrounded by endless waiting), elevates the film beyond its familiar beats. His feel for the landscape, the very last gasp of the great American West (Mitchum wandering towards home at the beginning is positively haunting) is matched by his feel for the characters, whose slow-burning love triangle has a tragic inevitability that’s hard to shake even after its conclusion. One could perhaps argue that Kennedy makes less of an impression than his co-stars, but that’s only because the other two are so wonderful. Mitchum delivers one of his very finest performances, his sly humor masking self-destructive and despairing qualities. But Hayward might just steal the show, as a woman trapped in a life she never wanted, glimpsing a possible way out in Jeff, but far too decent to do anything about it.
“Johnny Guitar” (1954)
You gotta love those French new wave critics for making it intellectually ok to adore “Johnny Guitar” — Ray’s trashy-to-the-point-of-camp, talky Western/Women’s Pic hybrid — thereby rescuing it from the category of “guilty pleasure” to which it might otherwise belong. You see, as that cumbersome description might suggest, there is almost too much going on here — venomous female rivalries, old flames, bank robberies, stagecoach holdups, lynchings, gunfights, betrayals, arson, intrigues, a fine measure of cock-blocking and plenty of last-minute changes of heart, all shot in fetishizable, painterly Technicolor. The film should be a complete mess, but somehow, although each individual element sits weirdly alongside any other, the whole is so well orchestrated as to make it, on some visceral level, completely satisfying. Joan Crawford, her face almost an abstraction of a face under mask-like, heavy make-up, plays Vienna, who we’re somehow supposed to believe is a scrappy ex-hooker/saloon girl who clawed her way to her dream of owning her own business: a saloon built seemingly in the middle of nowhere that will pay dividends once the railway is routed right by it. Crawford is simply too patrician, too steely, too stately a presence to sell that backstory convincingly, and her unbending sternness makes it hard for the men who love her to seem anything but emasculated ciphers by comparison. But that’s part of the pleasure here: right down to the climactic showdown being between two women (Crawford and a maniacal Mercedes McCambridge), this film doesn’t simply replace male western archetypes with females (“Calamity Jane,” it ain’t), it actually lets its narrative warp into melodrama around its women, so what we get is almost subversive for the Western genre. Apparently, Crawford, as became her wont, feuded with practically everyone on set, especially Sterling Hayden, (the hero of this film in title only), and McCambridge (later the voice of the demon in “The Exorcist“), who referred to her as “a mean, tipsy, powerful, rotten-egg lady.” And perhaps that shows: as a film it’s a fascinating muddle of clashing characterizations and story strands that might not run deep, but boy are they writ large. But as a primer for some of Ray’s preoccupations (outsider-iness, the past vs. the present, male violence, the power dynamic in relationships) and style (theatrical Technicolor, staginess, wordiness) it’s pretty much, well, essential.