In this most unconventional of Westerns, Joan Crawford stars as Vienna, a saloon keeper under attack from Emma Small, a ruthless landowner played with malicious glee by Mercedes McCambridge. Determined to bring down Vienna and her cohorts, Emma tries to pin the town’s crimes on her rival’s posse. Vienna makes a defiant stand against these forces with the aid of her recently-returned former lover, the mysterious Johnny Guitar. Seething with sexual tension and marked by day-glo costuming, Ray’s world twists the moralistic divide between good and evil in a film which was dismissed in its time by critics but has since been revived (thanks in large part to writers such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut) as a masterful allegory of the ethically-challenged McCarthy-era.