To start off our Staff Choice selections, Head of Technical Operations Mark Hoare has chosen Nicholas Ray’s ferocious, frayed melodramatic Western, led by two women whose real-life dislike for one another bled into their performances.
Vienna (Joan Crawford) owns a saloon on the edge of town, a regular haunt of outlaw The Dancin' Kid (Scott Brady). The railroad is coming and Vienna's plot of land will soon make her fortune. But opposing her is Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge), scion of the richest family in the area and so ashamed of her desire for the Kid that she wants him dead. Enter Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden), a musician with a past that Vienna is desperate for him to forget. Enter love or something like. A yearning score by Peggy Lee and Victor Young. A cast including John Carradine, Royal Dano, Ernest Borgnine and Ben Cooper. The boldest colour scheme. Pedro Almodóvar's favourite film. Rapture.
Mark: "I chose this chiefly because it's sublime and I adore it, but also because of its melding and rejection of genre and convention, it’s repression and twisted emotion, it’s gorgeous and gaudy colours, it’s spite and malice, McCambridge and Crawford in a battle of who crumbles first, the longing".
USA 1954 Nicholas Ray 110m
