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The aesthete's domain, writing and painting and theater, manipulation is its own art. San Francisco, indoors mainly. "Have you seen the view? Looks better with me in it." The publishing reader (Joan Leslie) has a wealthy fiancé (Zachary Scott) and a new roommate (Joan Fontaine), who kicks off the disruption by turning up one day earlier than expected. Business school is too much work for the visitor, she prefers the shortcut of stealing her friend's intended and then presiding over the social whirl, quite the malicious grin behind the demure façade. "Two of you, one's fictional," notices the novelist (Robert Ryan), who doesn't mind as long as he gets to explore their "sex attraction." The queer painter (Mel Ferrer) plays one-man Greek chorus, his portrait of the vixen floats through the tale (cf. Hitchcock's Blackmail). A system of desire and money studied by Nicholas Ray in an astute companion piece to In a Lonely Place—the Fontaine sweetness is taken apart as astringently as the Bogart toughness. Unions and breakups, people always coming and going, a subjective camera at the center of a circle of socialites. The ingenué "just as helpless as a wildcat" and the tuxedoed clod in the mansion. "He's fine." "How can anyone be fine with a hook in his throat?" A certain kinship with Buñuel's long interiors (in, say, Una Mujer sin Amor or Él), staircases and mirrors and even an open refrigerator door have their roles to play in Ray's exceptional staging. A superb Robert Ryan line, superbly delivered: "I love you so much I wish I liked you." The aviator's moment of clarity, the price of scandal on the display window. Johnny Guitar detonates all of this. With Harold Vermilyea, Virginia Farmer, Kathleen Howard, Dick Ryan, and Bess Flowers. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |