FORTY GUNS was locked and loaded by Samuel Fuller, who wrote, produced & directed the bonkers western in 1957, another in the genre for star Barbara Stanwyck, and while not the best (The Furies) or the worst (Cattle Queen Of Montana) in the batch for the durable leading lady, it’s certainly the loopiest. That’s courtesy of Fuller’s flamboyant direction and especially his ‘chew this!’ writing, so pulpy it’s pulverized. Sniffed away at the time, critics have since elevated the baroque balderdash  to “bravo!” stature; though shot in Arizona, it’s so over-the-top that it’s practically the first spaghetti western. After their initial startling appearance and a few tamed-down scenes later, the title’s forty guns don’t bang much, but had they all gone off at once they wouldn’t have the impact of the ‘are-they-kidding?’ ballad that lets us know that man-handling Barb is “a high-ridin’ woman, with a whip“. The ditty is stroll-by crooned to a half-dozen cowboys taking outdoor baths in barrel tubs, all lathered up with enough suds to clog the Colorado.

In a truly bravura opener three brothers and their wagon are left covered in the desert dust by the pell mell ride-by of forty horsemen led by a black-garbed woman on a white stallion. Harry Sukman’s zestful scoring and Joseph Biroc’s crisp black & white CinemaScope camerawork seal the exciting kickoff. The bros arrive in Tombstone only to find it an untamed mess, cowed and corrupted under the domineering lash of rich rancher ‘Jessica Drummond’ (Stanwyck) who cucks the cocksure with a mere ice-princess glance. In a rift on the Earp clan, the justice-minded Bonnell brothers are well-known peacemaker ‘Griff’ (Barry Sullivan), ladies man ‘Wes’ (spit-slick Gene Barry, affecting the signature Fuller cigar) and itching-to-prove-himself  ‘Chico’ (Robert Dix, the son of Richard Dix, and about as subtle) and their given goodness runs Colt-first into resident vermin and whipped-puppy ‘Sheriff Logan’ (Dean Jagger) and ‘Brockie’ (John Ericson), Jessica’s vicious kid brother. Given that the five men with the key roles are played by actors either dull (Sullivan, Jagger), grating (Barry) or inept (Ericson, Dix) it’s as sure as a bullseye from Hawkeye that Stanwyck blows them off the screen with the casual ease of a full-grown lioness cuffing teenage baboons. Oh, there’s also Barry’s “love interest”, played by Eve Brent; pretty, but about as frontierish as Lady Gaga, with a hairstyle as close to Old Tombstone as pre-zoned Malibu. She’s a gunsmith (and I’m Che Guevara), which gives Gene allowance to purr “I never kissed a gunsmith before.”

The straight-faced script is a laff-a-minute. Like The Force, the sex-tinged undercurrent ‘is strong in this one’: the topper is Stanwyck measuring Sullivan by musing about his, uh, ‘pistol’, teasing “May I feel it? Just curious.”  To which his natural reply is “Naw, might go off in your face.”  Which shows that censors can not only confuse apples with oranges, they can evidently miss peaches from cucumbers. Jist sayin’.

“He was no good, like your brother.”

While Sullivan and Jagger, though boring, are certainly competent, nearly every other supporting performance is terrible.  Now, John Ericson may have been a nice guy, but he couldn’t act his way out of a crosswalk: he does a ‘drunk scene’ that should go down in Acting Class History as a template for Exactly How Not To Do It. It’s part of a town-busting rampage that may have inspired Mel Brooks: remember how in Blazing Saddles ‘Hedley Lamarr’s cowboy crew terrorized ‘Rock Ridge’?  The movie is ridiculous, but it’s certainly a lot of fun. Fuller fans will love it.

Box office at 96th place doesn’t seem impressive, but the $2,600,000 gross was a win since it was made for a lean $300,000: Fuller was a crafty producer. With cinematographer Biroc’s lensing, the direction’s intensity level, the weird acting and the script’s boiling kettle of bombast and meditation, this picture edges into the operatic, a style that Sergio Leone would go grandiose with in the European frontier flings of the 60’s.

With Jidge Carroll (a veteran big band singer, yet awful at acting; he gets to warble the cheese-grating “High-Ridin’ Woman”), Paul Dubov, Hank Worden (dependably gauche), Chuck Roberson, Chuck Hayward and Ziva Rodann. 80 minutes.

* Wham bam, thank you Sam—was this prairie psychout Fuller’s answer to Gunfight At The O.K. Corral, 1957’s Big Earp Western? He carved another notch in the genre that year with the equally loopy Run Of The Arrow and, not sated with 19th-Century overkill, put Gene Barry in again (why?) to battle the insidious ‘Namish commies of China Gate. One thing Samuel Fuller sagas never were—dull. Dramatic but less frantic, sure-shooter Stanwyck’s other 1957 entry was also a western and a good one, the underrated Trooper Hook.