Alienated Characters in Johnny Guitar

It was the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci who called Nicholas Ray’s 1954 Republic production Johnny Guitar a baroque western. Up to that point in 1954, the western film had always been a very conservative genre, with its own stylistic and narrative conventions. But Ray subverted all that with his off-beat characterization, where gender roles were reversed, and the principal leads were mirrored off each other or served as extensions of each other’s personas.    However, Johnny Guitar did not give birth to a subgenre. It was too bizarre, too poetic, and too loaded with symbolism to remain anything other than an anomaly. This modest little film, which was generally misunderstood upon its release, has grown in reputation ever since, and is now widely considered to be one of the greatest westerns ever made.    It is also Nicholas Ray’s first color film. He makes full use of the blazing Trucolor process in his color coding, and thereby creates a dreamy, hallucinatory effect, which together with his syncopated editing and his expressionist mise-en-scène, helps lift the film to another level.    The purpose of the book, Alienated Characters in Johnny Guitar, is to give the reader a nuts-and-bolts breakdown of Nicholas Ray’s directorial style and his use of mise-en-scène. All too often that element is glossed over in film criticism, which takes a far more literal and narrative approach.       
Excerpt from the bookRay understands her frustration with the underlying hypocrisy that carries her in the maelstrom of role playing, but does not believe that the solution to her problems lies in the passive retreat into the isolation of her private room. He understands that solitude can be a symptom of this frustration, but has no sympathy for the self-indulgence of letting it be the answer to this frustration. A retreat into isolation from a none too harmonious world can only generate negative feelings of fear and disheartenment towards the world one must turn to in an effort of self-adjustment, in the hope of a constructive, meaningful, and happy life with the limitations of the everyday. To oppose the world from the entrenchment of isolation is not a challenge but a resignation.           
About the authorSøren Kjellberg (b. 1963) has traveled a lot in his life and has lived in Denmark, Nigeria, England, and Japan. He has an International Baccalaureate from St. Mary’s International School in Tokyo and an ACTT-accredited diploma in The Art and Technique of Filmmaking from London International Film School. He has held down various jobs, such as nightwatchman, washer-upper, ESL teacher, and filmmaker. After having struggled for much of his adult life, he was finally diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome in 1998. He has previously made three documentaries and written two books.