There are many versions of how Johnny Guitar—that “bold excursion into camp,” in the words of David Thomson—came into being. Most versions burnish Ray’s mystique at the expense of others. One way in which Hollywood tradition and auteurist theory overlap is by underplaying or dismissing the contribution of the writer of a film—in this case Roy Chanslor, author of the novel and script, sometimes described by zealous Ray admirers as a journeyman or “hack” writer.
Born in Missouri in 1899, Chanslor attended the University of California–Berkeley, becoming editor of the student newspaper. Ambitious and versatile, Chanslor started out as a beat reporter for California newspapers but wrote his first stage play in 1929. In 1931, he began alternating novels and film scripts, and over the next thirty years he amassed sixty Hollywood credits, mostly contract pictures for B stars and directors, including installments in the Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes series.
During his career in Hollywood’s basement, however, Chanslor built a reputation for talent and integrity. He had a social conscience too, once going public to condemn a studio for turning a Negro character in one of his films into a demeaning stereotype in order to accommodate southern censors. He was known in the industry for plots involving brash women and breezy dialogue (with “a high quotient of smartness and toughness,” as one New York Times critic noted of a Chanslor novel). As far back as Front Page Woman, a 1935 Bette Davis programmer for Warner Bros., Chanslor had made a specialty of strong, eccentric female characters who invaded male professions.
Another of his niches was Westerns. A few years before Johnny Guitar, Chanslor had worked without credit on Rancho Notorious, an offbeat Fritz Lang Western with Marlene Dietrich as an aging saloon singer. A few years after, he would pen an even loopier feminist sagebrush novel, The Ballad of Cat Ballou. (Cat Ballou would be made into a 1965 film with Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin that was nominated for five Oscars —almost two years after Chanslor died of a heart attack while working on the script in a rented flat in Encino.)
Chanslor and his wife, award-winning children’s illustrator and mystery novelist Torrey (Marjorie) Chanslor, were old friends with Joan Crawford. Their friendship peaked in 1953, when Chanslor published two novels linked to the star. The first, The Naked I, was a roman à clef about Hollywood, featuring a novelist moonlighting as a screenwriter who frets about selling his soul to the movie industry, even as he falls in love with a glamorous actress. The second, Johnny Guitar, was a film about rival gun-toting women, which he dedicated to Crawford.
The main character in Chanslor’s novel is a beautiful woman named Vienna who runs a saloon on the outskirts of a Wyoming town. A puritanical townswoman named Emma, who detests Vienna, is looking for excuses to agitate against her. Vienna may or may not have had a past romance with an outlaw called the Dancing Kid (he likes to dance with himself). Trouble breaks out when the Dancing Kid’s gang robs a stage and a handsome enigmatic stranger carrying a guitar steps off a train and takes a fancy to Vienna.
Crawford bought the rights to Johnny Guitar before publication. She may indeed have commissioned the novel, with Chanslor first writing it as a lengthy treatment, a common practice for Hollywood screenwriters. The film of Johnny Guitar was announced in the late spring of 1953; the book wouldn’t appear in print until September, when the New York Times hailed it as “one of the best [Westerns] in a long time.”
The novel’s four main characters—Vienna, Johnny Guitar, Emma, and the Dancing Kid—closely resemble their namesakes in the final film. Emma in the book is just as ornery a character, just as obsessed with Vienna, just as determined to seal Vienna’s death. In both the book and the film, Emma organizes a mob that tries to lynch Vienna; in both the book and film, Emma shotguns a chandelier, starting the bonfire that burns Vienna’s saloon. The novel does insert a third female character into the story’s climactic shootout: Elsa, the Dancing Kid’s girlfriend. But press announcements suggest that Elsa was eliminated from the movie story line before filming, and the gunfight duel to the death—a memorable sequence in the picture—already had been narrowed down to Emma and Vienna.
Ray and the film’s writer had all summer and much of the fall to adapt the novel and sculpt the script. But who was that writer? And to what extent was Ray involved? This is one of the enduring mysteries of Johnny Guitar—one that has fascinated Ray’s French devotees in particular.
The film’s only credited writer is Philip Yordan, who is believed to have added finishing touches to the script on location. Yordan always insisted that he joined the production after Chanslor’s own draft had been written and accepted and after the filming started. But Yordan had a shadowy background that casts doubt on his claims. Before Hollywood, he admittedly paid someone to attend law school and take the bar exams in his name. On Broadway, his first hit play, Anna Lucasta, was the subject of a bitter lawsuit, with a closet collaborator suing Yordan and successfully claiming the lion’s share of authorship. A screenwriter since 1940, Yordan had amassed credits on about twenty films before Johnny Guitar; a few dozen more would follow, including other collaborations with Ray.
But Yordan’s checkered history makes it difficult to confirm how much actual writing—if any—he did on any one script. He was perfectly capable of spitballing clever ideas and snappy dialogue, but sometimes (if not frequently) he left the actual writing to others. Yordan had a longtime secretary who worked over several of his early scripts without credit, and he confessed to hiring other “surrogates” over the years—a few blacklisted writers—to pen the numerous films bearing his name.
In one interview, blacklisted writer Ben Maddow said he helped Yordan with Johnny Guitar—a service that Maddow performed, without credit, on several Yordan pictures in the 1950s. But Maddow conceded that he’d ghostwritten so many Yordan scripts that he couldn’t always keep track, and he later retreated from the claim, saying that Johnny Guitar wasn’t a job he especially remembered, so probably he didn’t write it. If a blacklistee did help with the script in the summer of 1953, that might explain why Ray himself, who was inclined to take inordinate credit for scripts—as with The Lusty Men, for example, or Rebel Without a Cause later on—never once boasted of writing Johnny Guitar: He couldn’t have easily admitted the involvement of a blacklistee.
Chanslor undoubtedly wrote a first draft, consulting with Ray and surely Crawford herself. It may be that Chanslor was the sole writer of the first draft: He was certainly capable, and whoever penned the adaptation carefully preserved the novel’s extremes and peculiarities while reorganizing the story more tightly around the four main characters. In the film, Johnny Guitar would become a more enigmatic, more conflicted character, while Vienna became angrier, at once more mannish and more feminist, quite unlike the stand-by-your-man women and mothers and housekeepers in other Nicholas Ray films. “A man can lie, steal, and even kill, but as long as he hangs on to his pride he’s still a man,” Vienna sneers at one point after Johnny boasts that he still has his pride. “All a woman has to do is slip once and she’s a tramp. It must be a great comfort for you to be a man.”
The script changed the setting to Arizona, while adding an intriguingly vague romantic backstory between Johnny Guitar and Vienna. (In the novel, the two meet for the first time in the town bank shortly after Johnny Guitar’s arrival; in fact, Vienna takes an instinctive dislike to the guitar man.) Nearly every line of dialogue in the book was tossed out and written anew. One notable exception, interestingly, was Johnny Guitar’s self-introductory line, “I’m a stranger here . . . ,” which is in the novel and which, later in life, Ray adopted as a kind of personal motto.
Over the summer of 1953, Chanslor’s exceptional novel became an even better script—with improvements still to come—taking Johnny Guitar further down its bold, distinctive path.
Ray assembled the rest of the cast with Joan Crawford and Republic studio head Herbert J. Yates looking over his shoulder. Crawford, a brunette, wanted a blond actress to play Emma, which would offer a visual contrast
in their scenes together, but Ray talked her into the brown-haired spitfire Mercedes McCambridge. Trained as a classical actress, a veteran of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre, McCambridge was already typed in Hollywood as a female heavy after winning an Oscar for her tough-talking debut in All the King’s Men in 1949.
Early on, the studio announced that Robert Mitchum would play the title role, but “previous commitments” kept him away. Ray tried to borrow Jeff Chandler, then gravitated to Sterling Hayden, the leader of the heist-gone-wrong in 1950’s The Asphalt Jungle. Hayden had confessed his ties to the Communist Party before HUAC in 1951, and he saw Johnny Guitar as belonging to the “morass” of B pictures he was condemned to make after selling his soul. (He never changed his opinion.) Ray and Hayden not only shared HUAC scars, they shared the same business manager, and Ray knew that Hayden—like him—needed the money.
Scott Brady—a Tierney behind his stage name, and the former brother-in-law of Ray’s lover Hanne Axmann—would play the Dancing Kid. Ernest Borgnine, Royal Dano, and Ben Cooper were cast as Bart, Corey, and Turkey, members of the Kid’s gang, clearly outlaws in the novel, law-abiding silver miners in the film, before they are falsely accused of a stage holdup and decide they may as well rob a bank. The supporting cast also included well-traveled character actor John Carradine as Vienna’s loyal vassal Old Tom, and Ward Bond—the only featured player who’d acted before for Ray—as John McIvers, a civic figure leading the mob.
Like everyone else in the film, the outlaws got bits of dialogue or stage business sketching in their character types. Dano plays a tubercular who reads a book to pass the time during his lookout stint on a knoll. When the Dancing Kid asks Bart, the meanest member of the gang, if he likes anything or anyone, he spits, “Me? I like me! And I’m taking good care of me.” Turkey shouts, “You talk like I’m a boy! I’m a man!” before demonstrating his shooting prowess to Vienna, and just before Johnny Guitar shoots the gun out of his hands. (Turkey is a different character in the book; in the movie he becomes a descendant of Bowie and a precursor of Plato, among other febrile young men in Nicholas Ray films. His scenes—his crush on and piteous betrayal of Vienna, leading to his hanging—have a special tenderness and emotional gravity.)
Flying Leathernecks had been Ray’s first exercise in Technicolor, but everything about that film had been subject to Howard Hughes’s whim. (The color was in full bloom only when John Wayne was furloughed home into a radiantly designed family living room.) Ray would have more freedom with the look of Johnny Guitar, and he worked closely with art director James W. Sullivan and cinematographer Harry Stradling (nominated for fourteen Oscars in his long career), marrying the surpassing natural beauty of the outdoor vistas with the coded, sometimes voluptuous colors of the characters’ attire.
Ray’s “provocative flair in handling color,” as film scholar Peter Wollen described it, would come to be recognized by academics and auteurists as one of his trademarks. “Like Bakst for Diaghilev,” Wollen effused, “he [Ray] would use daring, often lurid combinations: red on red, green on green, or, as Godard described it, ‘barley-sugar orange shirts, acid-green dresses, violet cars, blue and pink carpets.’ ”
Ray took his cues on color dynamics from Chanslor’s novel, which depicted Vienna as a “fine bold woman in black pants and red silk shirt,” who wore “boyish riding breeches” when she wasn’t gliding around in revealing peignoirs. The director jotted endless notes in the margins of the book and script, building on Chanslor’s descriptions. When Crawford, in the film, wasn’t dressed in gunslinger black, she was sporting violent red blouses or blinding white dresses, “her lips, full and red, bold red, painted” (as Chanslor wrote), her witchy eyebrows dark and theatrical.
Alternatively, Emma is dressed in emerald-green togs when she first appears, like a crazed Dorothy fresh from the color half of The Wizard of Oz. The posse coming for Vienna arrives from Emma’s brother’s funeral in blacks and whites, like MCA agents, as Ray once said. (Emma, in the same colors, looks like a nun.) Johnny Guitar is garbed in tangerine, the Dancing Kid in key lime, and his gang in similarly fruity colors, with young Turkey in banana yellow.
Filming in color was still new to Ray, and he promoted his theories in numerous interviews. “I’ve always felt that the psychology of color is overlooked,” the director explained on one occasion, “not just in motion pictures but in numerous situations. I’ve discovered that there is a definite audience reaction to the repeated use of certain shades. This also involves color identification with a character, and this particular mental process is grasped unconsciously by an audience.” For a man who often felt boxed out of the script, color was another way of stamping his signature on his films—adding an emotional energy and a further layer of interpretation to the scenes.
Once again, as with They Live by Night, having the clear structure of an established novel—and a long period of scriptwork and planning—worked to Ray’s advantage. By the time he launched the photography of Johnny Guitar in Sedona, Arizona, in the third week of October 1953, Ray had not been behind the camera for an entire year.
About thirty miles south of Flagstaff, Sedona is a town in an area of high desert, its canyons and massive red rock formations a favorite location for Hollywood Westerns. If Ray had been hoping for a Grand County or rodeo-circuit location experience, however, he was sadly mistaken.
Ray’s off-and-on fling with Joan Crawford had ended for good over the summer, and by the time they arrived in Sedona there was a distinct unease between them. Neither pretended to be monogamous, and either one may have ended the affair, though with Ray it was usually the women who did. But the timing was bad for the director, as it had been when he fired Libby Holman, a star of Beggar’s Holiday, just after sleeping with her.
Like Bogart in Knock on Any Door and In a Lonely Place, Crawford was the star and producer of Johnny Guitar; she outranked the director in billing, salary, and actual power.
Crawford arrived in Sedona already feeling defensive. Perhaps she was just getting into character, but it soon became clear that she felt Roy Chanslor had double-crossed her, writing the character of Emma to upstage her Vienna. Crawford couldn’t forget that Mercedes McCambridge had been Ray’s casting brainstorm; she was infuriated when the younger actress resisted dyeing her hair blond, and even more so when Ray defended her.
Sets for the film were built on the outskirts of Sedona: Vienna’s saloon, the Dancing Kid’s hideout atop a knoll, the façades of the town’s buildings. Before they were even completed, however, Ray first shot one of the film’s dramatic action scenes, with Vienna submerging herself in icy river waters and clinging to Johnny Guitar while escaping from the lynch mob. Afterward, the director thanked both players for their professionalism, according to Bob Thomas’s authoritative biography of Crawford, ceremonially bestowing a bottle of brandy on each of the performers and telling Crawford and Hayden to take the rest of the day off.
Ray turned his attentions to the younger actress who still proudly wore her theater background on her sleeve. The next shots involved Emma and the vigilante posse. When Ray called action, McCambridge expertly spat her lines while keeping her poise on a fidgeting horse. “Beautifully done!” proclaimed Ray. But the director “immediately felt he was being watched,” according to Thomas’s book; glancing over his shoulder, Ray spied Crawford watching from a nearby hill, trembling with fury. “She turned on her heel and disappeared beyond the hill,” wrote Thomas. A “feud” between the actresses “exploded when the company applauded the McCambridge gal,” wrote Hollywood columnist Harrison Carroll at the time.
It probably didn’t help that costar Scott Brady passed Crawford’s room later that day and shouted to the actress, “Hey, you should have seen McCambridge work today! I wouldn’t be surprised if that dame won another Oscar.”
Crawford had brought cases of vodka on location, and although some of it was for entertaining those cast members she liked, she drank her quota. That night, as he roamed the grounds of th
e Cedar Motel, Ray spotted a drunken Crawford lurching along the nearby highway, strewing objects that “he recognized upon close examination as Mercedes’ costumes for the movie,” according to Thomas’s book. In the morning Ray vacated his private cabin so that McCambridge could move out of the motel and live a safe distance from Crawford. That only looked like more favoritism to Crawford, who demanded an afternoon meeting with the director and insisted on rewrites to enhance some of her scenes. Ray tried to talk her out of expensive script delays, but the star was “sober and adamant,” wrote Thomas.
Late that night, Philip Yordan got a call from Lew Wasserman of MCA, which represented him as well as Ray and Crawford (Chanslor and McCambridge too, for that matter). Yordan was known inside the industry as an unflappable emergency script doctor, and Crawford wanted someone new—not Roy Chanslor—to make changes. Wasserman asked Yordan to step in, and the next day Yordan and Arthur Park, a senior MCA agent, flew to Sedona.
A Chicago native, Yordan was balding, hawk nosed, with black goggle glasses that advertised his bookishness. (For all that, he was catnip to ladies.) The writer had met Ray only a few times in passing. Both were friends with Anthony Mann, who’d directed several Yordan scripts. Ray and Yordan had been thrown together at a Hollywood party one night when Frank Lovejoy, who’d gotten on Ray’s bad side while playing the detective Brub in In a Lonely Place, picked a drunken argument with Yordan. “He got very aggressive,” recalled Yordan, “and Nick, who was a very big man, defended me. I didn’t know him then, but I knew of him.”
In Sedona—and often enough in the future—Yordan would repay the favor. Wearing his pained, drained look, Ray waited for him in his motel room. “I need this picture,” he told Yordan, “but I can’t talk to Miss Crawford anymore. Please do something with her.”
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