The biggest lie in a great movie?

"Johnny Guitar" is a great movie, perhaps one of the greatest movies. But something is bothering me. We pretty much know now, that Nick Ray did actually speak in front of the HUAC committee. For years, people said, even in the first big biography about Ray, that he had somehow managed to avoid being blacklisted or even questioned by HUAC because of his connections with Howard Hughes. Considering Hughes' own problems with the FBI, that never seemed totally convincing to me. And now apparently some more evidence has come out, and it seems very likely that Ray did basically the same *beep* that Kazan did, but managed to do it secretly (he wasn't as famous as Kazan, and perhaps the Hughes connection really did help him somewhat).

So, back to the movie -- there's a lot of scenes in the film obviously relating to the blacklist and the whole general idea of a "witch-hunt" or lynching an innocent person. One specific aspect of this is what's bothering me -- it has to do mostly with Turkey and Black Bart. When the lynch mob finds Turkey at Vienna's casino, they manage to convince Turkey that they're going to let him free if he "names" Vienna as being "one of them." It's one of the scenes where the parallel to the "hollywood blacklist" becomes most obvious (at least in retrospect). Turkey agrees to implicate Vienna, vaguely nodding in assent, but they string him up anyway. Which -- not incidentally -- makes us, the audience, feel somewhat better about the fact that Turkey (the youngest character in the film) got killed by a savage lynch mob for something he didn't do.

Later, when they're all holed up at the cabin, Black Bart tries to convince Royal Dano's character (the guy with TB) that the two of them should make a deal with Emma to betray the others, and that she'll let them escape. "You're crazy!" says Dano, and when Black Bart (Ernest Borgnine) stabs him in the back, he utters one of the film's many unforgettable lines: "Some people just won't listen!"

Now, I know this is a lot of buildup but hopefully it hasn't been too hard to read -- here's the problem: in the film, everybody who "gives names" or agrees to betray their comrades ends up getting killed in a very nasty way (Black Bart gets shot down by Johnny Guitar). But in real life, Nick Ray got away with it. He basically betrayed people, but he was able to escape with his career more or less intact. So, I guess this is the question -- was that a way for Nick Ray to eviscerate himself? I'm not just talking about the script here, which Ray had something to do with, but also his direction emphasizes these scenes somewhat (each betrayal is shown in close-up, after a lot of dramatic buildup). I guess it's impossible under the "production code" to show somebody do something so nasty as to betray somebody else and get away with it. But Nick Ray could usually undermine the "code" with his direction if he wanted to imply something or to be satirical. He seems to genuinely believe that these people deserved punishment -- did he believe that he himself deserved punishment that he never received as well?

Did I not love him, Cooch? MY OWN FLESH I DIDN'T LOVE BETTER!!! But he had to say 'Nooooooooo'