DVD of the Week: Johnny Guitar

At a moment when the DVD is said to be doomed, Olive Films has, in an amazingly short period of time, vaulted to the forefront of DVD distribution, as seen, most recently, in their release of Nicholas Ray’s “Johnny Guitar” (which I discuss in this clip). Its absence from home video has been one of the market’s most grievous omissions. Among their other great recent releases are Abraham Polonsky’s “Force of Evil,” John Cassavetes’s “Too Late Blues,” Jean-Luc Godard’s “Histoire(s) du Cinéma,” “Numéro Deux,” and “Ici et Ailleurs,” John Ford’s “Rio Grande,” Ingmar Bergman’s “Face to Face,” Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Despair” and “I Only Want You to Love Me,” Joseph Losey’s surprising drama of ethnic and generational conflict “The Lawless,” Frank Tashlin’s “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” “The Geisha Boy,” and “It’s Only Money,” Otto Preminger’s “Such Good Friends,” “Hurry Sundown,” and “Skidoo”—in short, a cornucopia of modern classics (and classic modernism). Their upcoming releases scheduled for next year are equally enticing. But even in such lofty company, “Johnny Guitar” stands out. Nicholas Ray is Hollywood’s most emotionally furious, extreme, and sensitive director, and, in a career of eliciting uniquely impassioned performances, those he coaxes from Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden are two of the greatest he ever got—therefore, two of the best ever recorded on film. I’ve written before about the film’s marvels; in this clip, we go to the evidence to consider the qualities with which Ray surpassed himself (even as he put so much of himself in), with which he got the actors to outdo themselves (even as they were never so much themselves either). It’s a miraculous movie that should never be far from screens, large or small.