Olive Films Blu-ray

Johnny Guitar was Nicholas Ray’s first of three Westerns, and it is probably the most operatic and baroque Western ever made, as well as the most melodramatic, with amorous exchanges between Johnny and Vienna that are so expressively exaggerated they would make even Douglas Sirk blush. Based on Roy Chanslor’s novel, the film is credited to screenwriter Philip Yordan, often a front for blacklisted writers of the period, like Ben Maddow, who, according to some, was the true writer behind Johnny Guitar. Reflective of this McCarthy-era paranoia, there is in the film, in opposition to the flowery declarations of love, a near constant antagonism between most every character, even those on the same side, the hostility and suspicion inducing its own delirious witch hunt. http://www.cutprintfilm.com/blu/new-blu-ray-johnny-guitar/