JOHNNY GUITAR – An essay by Piero Spila

A new title is added to the extensive series “The Best Films of Our Life” published by Gremese Editore and directed by Enrico Giacovelli. Now available in all bookstores, Piero Spila’s essay on one of the most loved western films, studied and honored by cult directors such as Truffaut, Wenders, Almod�var and Scorsese: “Johnny Guitar”. The film, directed by Nicholas Ray, is a film that fortunately escapes the cult of museums, it does not age and, more than seventy years after its first viewing, it still knows how to speak to the contemporary public with themes that are always on the agenda (intolerance , the cult of oppression, democracy put at risk). The volume, integrated with a precious iconographic apparatus of over 200 images and frames taken directly from the film, reconstructs the socio-cultural-political context in which the film was created, starting from its genesis to its reception in theaters and among critics. A mysterious and extravagant Western, but also liberating, anarchic, devoted to utopia, marked by the poisons of the political world in which it took shape (the Cold War, McCarthyism) but above all by the ferocious determination of the protagonist, Vienna (Joan Crawford), who she never ceases to evoke her desire for the future despite being hated, persecuted and marginalized. A destiny, his, which partly resembles that of the film’s director, Nicholas Ray, always unable to reach an agreement with the producers and consequently destined to lose the game with the devil (success, money) even before play it. “Johnny Guitar” is a western that has little to do with the rules of the genre but which has within it, very alive, the flame of cinema magic. Piero Spila, former director of “Cinecritica”, has been carrying out critical and essayistic activities since the end of the 1960s, collaborating with various publications. He taught History and Language of Cinema. He is the author and editor of volumes and monographs on cinema, and for the Gremese publisher he has published books on Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci, and on the films Aurora and Il Gattopardo.