GENE BARRY IN SAMUEL FULLER'S NOIRISH WESTERN 'FORTY GUNS'

Barbara Stanwyck and Barry Sullivan in FORTY GUNS Year: 1957 Rating: ***

It's not that Samuel Fuller was an entirely overrated director, but more modern and outright artistic auteurs, from France to America as well as the myriad of rabid Fuller fans, try way too hard finding controversial symbolism in just about everything he does...

Which is downright stretching it for FORTY GUNS, a deliberately sparse and simple 90-minute Western-Noir that somehow feels extremely long: which isn't entirely bad as several of the characters seem created for something more vastly epic and thematically significant...

Barry Sullivan, Robert Dix and Gene Barry in FORTY GUNS

All having gathered in a lawless small town controlled by Barbara Stanwyck as a cattle baron curbed by three brothers who have ridden in, literally in her horse-clomping dust... to possibly change things, Wyatt Earp style...

Particularly facing her almost hypnotic control using those titular FORTY RIDERS, including a few brash, wild-card killers and yet, with all the formidable backup, what's overcrowded are the three male leads...

Eve Brent in FORTY GUNS

Wherein Fuller's STEEL HELMET b-movie star Gene Barry, who falls in love with sassy gunsmith and overall scene-stealer Eve Brent, could have been the sole focus as wooden pacifist brother Barry Sullivan, mentoring young upstart Richard Dix, gets in the way of Dean Jagger's passive sheriff subplot and other underused townies... in what opens and closes with incredibly-filmed action sequences, playing out as bombastic as any John Ford Western headliner...

There just needed less of the corny roman chorus crooning throughout melodramatic patches of near-romantic dialogue and more strategically offensive and defensive gun-play, since both the anticipating audience and tension-filled characters deserved more of an overall fight.

Eve Brent and Gene Barry in FORTY GUNS

Eve Brent and Gene Barry in FORTY GUNS

Barbara Stanwyck and Barry Sullivan in FORTY GUNS

Criterion Blu Ray of Samuel Fuller's FORTY GUNS