The man who gives Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar its title went by another name a long time ago. He doesn't go by the name anymore and in the span of the film's runtime, we only hear that name four or five times. These days, the red-shirted cowboy goes by the name of Johnny Guitar (the great Sterling Hayden) and he rides into a lonely Arizona town with explosions going off around him. His idea is to get a job at a local saloon run by old-West queen Vienna (Joan Crawford), playing guitar and being nice to the customers. There's no sense, to him anyway, to resurrect Johnny Logan, the deadly gunslinger he once was and hopes never to be again.

It would seem an apt time for Johnny Logan to exist however. Not long after he arrives, Vienna is given an ultimatum: Either turn over ex-lover the Dancin' Kid (Scott Brady) or leave town for good. The demand is made by local land and beef baron Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge in a barn-burner of a performance), who also happens to be smitten with the Kid. Even as the Dancin' Kid arrives with his posse, the match is just an inch from the fuse. That inch evaporates when the Kid, tired of being bullied by Emma and the other locals, decides to rob the local bank before heading to New York.

A McCarthy-era fever dream that doubles as a Freudian cobweb of mother figures and lonely boys with their guns, Johnny Guitar is the Western relocated to a carnival funhouse painted with technicolor reds, yellows, and blues. Both completely ignoring its totems and invigorating the genre at the same time, Ray sets much of the action inside, including the riveting introduction of Vienna that pits the magisterial Crawford against a bloodthirsty crowd led by Emma. Though both Hayden and McCambridge publicly condemned their co-star for jealousy and showboating, this is perhaps the notorious Crawford's last great performance, proudly theatrical and volcanic in its intensity.

Allegiances, morals, and intentions are all a shell game in Johnny Guitar. There's an especially interesting dynamic going on in the Kid's posse as they always seem to be reconsidering whether they work for the Kid or for Vienna; between Borgnine's feral double-crosser and Ben Cooper's sniveling runt of the litter, they possess the loyalty of a pack of hyenas. Even earlier, a joke is made of it: The Kid announces that he likes Johnny until Johnny says he'd rather work with Vienna. These back-flips of devotions and betrayals give Ray's film a potent danger and gives ferocity to the film's political subtext.

Made only a year before the bewildering success of Rebel Without a Cause would cast him into the limelight, Guitar was the first exploration of a technicolor candy land for Ray, who now seems to be the most lurid and lavish of the 1950s cinematic expressionists. Upon its release, Variety panned it while Francois Truffaut proudly claimed it the "beauty and the beast" of the genre. Armed with the great cinematographer Harry Stradling, Ray made something that would in any era seem absurd: A pop-culture madhouse dressed up in spurs and a cowboy hat. Its effect is nothing short of euphoric daze, like hearing The Ronettes on a radio station devoted to Hank Williams.