An Arizona landscape that resembles no place on Earth, but rather an expressionist backdrop painted by a soul on fire. Blood-red rocks, skies of an unnatural turquoise, interiors that throb with acidic yellows and greens. In this hallucinatory scenery, a woman dressed as a man waits, not for a hero, but for the ghost of a past love, a gunslinger who has traded his Colt for a guitar. In 1954, Nicholas Ray does not direct a Western. He directs a baroque opera, a chamber melodrama disguised as a sagebrush saga, a Greek tragedy set in a saloon that looks more like a Freudian cave than a frontier outpost. "Johnny Guitar" is the fever dream of the Western genre, an autopsy of its conventions conducted with the precision of a scalpel and the passion of a betrayed lover.

The film disintegrates the Fordian archetype of the West as an epic space of nation-building. Here, the space is not open and promising, but claustrophobic and neurotic. Vienna’s saloon, brought to life by a Joan Crawford at the height of her statuesque stardom, is embedded in rock, an impossible architecture that is at once fortress, womb, and stage. Ray, who studied under Frank Lloyd Wright before becoming a director, conceives of spaces not as passive containers for the action, but as external projections of the characters' psyches. Vienna’s saloon is her inner world: a precarious refuge, besieged from the outside by irrational forces, a place where the piano is played and cards are dealt while a puritanical fury howls outside. Ray’s Frontier is not a place to be civilized, but a psychological arena where primordial drives collide.

At the center of this arena are not men, but two women. If the classic Western is an eminently phallic genre, a perpetual measuring of virility through the speed of the draw and the vastness of the land one owns, "Johnny Guitar" performs a radical and unsettling reversal. The men are ancillary figures, almost decorative. Johnny “Guitar” Logan (Sterling Hayden), the eponymous hero, is a reactive character, a broken man who has sublimated his violence into music. It is Vienna who owns the land, who challenges power, who dictates the rules. She is the true driving force of the narrative. And her nemesis is not a rough cattleman or a gold-thirsty bandit, but another woman: Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge), whose moralizing fury masks a sexual frustration as violent as it is repressed.

The clash between Vienna and Emma is the film’s true duel. It is a war that transcends a simple rivalry for a man (the Dancin’ Kid, a mere catalyst) and becomes a conflict between two worldviews, two female archetypes. Vienna, with her initially masculine and later immaculate white clothes, represents modernity, independence, a self-aware and entrepreneurial sexuality. Emma, perpetually dressed in black, embodies repressive hysteria, jealousy turned into ideology, the fear of desire that transforms into collective violence. Their mutual hatred, amplified by the legendary animosity between the two actresses on set—it is said that an alcoholic and despotic Crawford threw McCambridge’s costumes into the middle of the street—has a telluric charge, a visceral quality that Ray’s lens captures in almost sadistic close-ups. The scene of the attempted lynching, with Emma haranguing the mob like a Torquemada in skirts, is one of the most terrifying depictions of mob psychology ever seen in cinema.

It is impossible, in fact, to separate "Johnny Guitar" from its historical context. Made at the height of the McCarthyite witch hunts, the film is one of the most powerful and overt allegories of the paranoia that gripped Hollywood and America. Emma Small is Joseph McCarthy, her posse of “decent” citizens is the armed wing of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and Vienna is the individual who refuses to “name names,” to bow to the collective hysteria to save herself. The request Johnny makes of Vienna—“Lie to me. Tell me you’ve waited for me all these years”—is a desperate echo from a world where lying has become the only currency for survival. Sterling Hayden himself had testified before HUAC, naming some of his colleagues, an act he regretted for the rest of his life. His performance as a man who wants to escape his violent past thus acquires a tragic, almost meta-textual resonance. Ray doesn't make a political film; he makes a film about the psychosis of politics, about the fever that turns neighbors into informants and justice into a public spectacle.

This feverish dimension is enhanced by a deliberately anti-naturalistic staging. The dialogue, written by Philip Yordan, is not conversation, but declamation—sharp aphorisms and poetic pronouncements that seem to have sprung from a tragedy by Jean Racine. “A man can lie, steal, and even kill,” says Vienna, “but as long as he does it for a good reason, he’s not a bad man.” It is a moral code that belongs not to the West, but to an existentialist universe where individual will clashes with the absurdity of the world. The Trucolor photography, a process less prestigious than Technicolor but capable of producing saturated, almost violent hues, transforms the landscape into a state of mind. Red is not the color of sunset, but of passion and blood; the yellow of Vienna’s shirt is not sunny, but a cry of defiance; the white of her final dress is not a symbol of purity, but of a nearly spectral reckoning, a mortal epiphany. It is Fauvist painting applied to celluloid, an aesthetic that would profoundly influence European filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, who saw in Ray a “poet” of cinema.

François Truffaut, writing in Cahiers du Cinéma, called "Johnny Guitar" “the Beauty and the Beast of the Western,” a brilliant insight. Because in this film, the categories are inverted: beauty is armed, and the beast is not a monster, but the mob itself. The climax, with the burning of the saloon—the destruction of Vienna’s inner world—and the final duel between the two women on a wooden walkway that seems suspended in the void, is not the apex of an adventure, but the final act of a lyric opera. Victor Young’s score, with its famous and melancholy ballad, does not comment on the action, but expresses its sorrowful soul.

To watch "Johnny Guitar" today is to witness an act of radical deconstruction. It is a film that uses the signifiers of the Western (guns, horses, saloons) to tell a story that has nothing to do with the Western. It is closer to the incendiary melodramas of Douglas Sirk, but with a sharper neurosis and a more naked desperation. It prefigures the stylized violence and moral nihilism of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns, but it does so with the sensibility of classical tragedy. It is an anomaly, a feverish masterpiece that proves that genres are not cages, but springboards for exploring the darkest and most contradictory depths of human nature. Johnny plays his guitar, but the music we hear is the strident and magnificent sound of an entire world—and an entire genre—falling to pieces.