Johnny Guitar stars Oscar winner Joan Crawford as Vienna, a saloon owner with a sordid past. Persecuted by the townspeople, Vienna must protect her life and property when a lynch mob led by her sexually repressed rival, Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge, attempts to frame her for a string of robberies she did not commit.

Enter Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden), a guitar-strumming ex-gunfighter, who once was and perhaps still is in love with Vienna. With the leads at their operatic best, the table is now set for an epic showdown in this one-of-a-kind western from director Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause).

A bizarrely veiled allegory for the McCarthy-era Red Scare, Johnny Guitar was misunderstood upon its initial release. One of the most original takes on the western genre, where the women are far tougher than the men, Johnny Guitar is praised by fans, filmmakers, and critics alike as groundbreaking.

Sarah Keller is Associate Professor of Art and Director of Cinema Studies at University of Massachusetts-Boston. She co-edited Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam University Press, 2012), and her book Maya Deren: Incomplete Control examines the role of unfinished work through Maya Deren's oeuvre (Columbia University Press, 2014). She is currently at work on a book about anxiety and the history of cinephilia.