Last year I made a new friend who helped me remember that happiness is possible. He’s my dearest Matty, and he loves the cinema. Early in our friendship I spent many evenings lost in the city because Matty’d just moved here, too. And while we’re both pretty good at choosing the movies we’d like to see, neither one of us has a sense of direction.
I’m always the driver, and I’ve gotten so hopelessly tangled up in these streets that we’ve wound up miles from the theater — I’ve accidentally found the airport, Hunter’s Point, and Colma — but so far we’ve never been late for a flick and neither of us has lost our temper.
Matty and I have uncannily similar tastes in movies, and I can’t begin to tell you how excited I was when I learned that Johnny Guitar, starring Joan Crawford at her most ball-busting, would be playing at the Castro Theater, i.e. The Most Spectacular Theater On Earth. At The Castro the popcorn is always fragrant and warm, the audience shouts at the actors onscreen, and each show begins with a live organ player who rises from the proscenium on a small hydraulic stage. To top it all off, I can find this theater without getting lost. So I phoned Matty about the show, and as usual we tried to rope in our other friends (who rarely share our tastes, who refused to go to A Star Is Born with us) and dragged them along.
If you haven’t seen this movie, you should, right away. It’s a western, or at least it appears to be one on the surface. The meanest, fightingest, most dominant characters in this western are female: Vienna (Joan Crawford) and Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge). One character says of Joan Crawford’s Vienna that he’s “never seen a woman who was more a man. She thinks like one, acts like one, and sometimes makes me feel like I’m not.”
Johnny Guitar isn’t a movie I love for the plot. Plot-heavy movies bore me as much as flat, straight roads and square city blocks. I love Johnny Guitar for its confusing subtext, it’s strange exploration of gender roles, and for Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge, who give seething performances. Their characters hate each other absolutely — or are they in love with each other?
