May 29 > Martin Scorsese Film School Presents- The Untold American Stories: Forty Guns
29 May 2018
Martin Scorsese Film School Presents- The Untold American Stories: Forty Guns
Date 2018.05.29 (Tuesday)
Time 19.00-22.00
Venue Broadway Cinematheque 1/F
Host
Speakers David Chan
Forty Guns
Dir: Samuel Fuller
Screenplay: Samuel Fuller
Photography: Joseph F. Biroc
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck、Barry Sullivan
1957 / 80 min / B&W / In English with English subtitles
One of the great revisionist Westerns of all time, Forty Guns melds Greek myth and genre tropes into a stylistically audacious proto-feminist fairy tale built around the larger-than-life figure of Barbara Stanwyck's "Woman with a Whip," Jessica Drummond, a seductive and ruthlessly sensible tyrant who rules with unflinching authority over her vast Arizona cattle territory and faithful army of men. Drummond's sole weakness and source of tragedy is her inability to control her feckless and violent younger brother, who wrecks havoc on the town of Tombstone and draws the wrath of Griff Bonnell, a legendary ex-gunslinger turned US Marshall in town on a mission with his two brothers. Fuller uses a glorious black-and-white widescreen canvas to etch a bold woodblock vision of the West, ignited by stylistic flourishes—extreme close-ups of eyes, shots down the barrel of a gun—that would be openly imitated by the likes of Sergio Leone and Seijun Suzuki, among the many auteurs influenced by Fuller's visionary films.