FORTY GUNS
Special Features: 4K Restoration
Barbara Stanwyck gives a steely performance as powerful Arizona rancher Jessica Drummond, who rules over Cochise County like a warlord, backed by her personal army of 40 hired guns, while indulging the lawless buffoonery of her younger brother, Brockie (John Ericson). When reformed gunslinger-turned-lawman Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan) arrives in Tombstone along with his brothers, Wes and Chico (Gener Barry and Robert Dix), bearing a warrant to arrest one of Jessica’s men, the two find themselves at odds, yet strangely attracted to one another. Samuel Fuller’s inventive, eccentric and wildly entertaining western has become a cult classic, inspiring filmmakers from Jean-Luc Godard to Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino. In his book, “A Dozen Eccentric Westersn,” critic Jonathan Rosenbaum called the film “probably the best and craziest [of Samuel Fuller’s westerns].” Rosenbaum describes the film further: “Shot in black-and-white CinemaScope in less than 10 days (according to Jean-Luc Godard, who wrote the first French review), [it] contains one of the lengthiest takes and tracking shots in the history of Hollywood [over five minutes], but it’s the violence and the hysteria that one mainly remembers. (Recalling the way a sexy gunsmith playfully points a shotgun at her boyfriend, Godard included an homage with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in his BREATHLESS.)” DIR/SCR/PROD Samuel Fuller. U.S., 1957, b&w, 80 min. NOT RATED
Run Time: 80 Minutes
Opening Date: Saturday, August 15, 2026
Genre: Western drama
