Blu-ray, DVD Release: Johnny Guitar

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Aug. 7, 2012
Price: DVD $24.95, Blu-ray $29.95
Studio: Olive Films


Johnny Guitar movie scene

Joan Crawford stars in Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar.

Director Nicholas Ray’s (Bigger Than Life) one-of-a-kind 1954 western Johnny Guitar makes its official U.S. DVD and Blu-ray debut nearly 60 years after its theatrical premiere.

The classic film stars Joan Crawford (Humoresque) as a saloon owner battling the local townspeople headed by Emma (Mercedes McCambridge, Suddenly, Last Summer), the local sexually repressed, lynch-happy female rancher out to frame her for a string of robberies. The title cowboy, played by Sterling Hayden (1900), is a guitar-strumming drifter with a dark past who was once in love with Crawford and has been offered a job in her saloon. Sparks and bullets and lots more eventually begin to fly…

Also starring Scott Brady, Ward Bond (Rio Bravo), Ernest Borgnine (Red) and John Carradine (The Ten Commandments), Ray’s strikingly colorful, intricately constructed film is generally considered to be one of the most original westerns of all time – a movie where the women are far tougher than the men and that plays like a bizarre allegory for the McCarthy Era Red Scare.

Oh, and that’s Peggy Lee singing the title song!

There are no bonus features on the Blu-ray amd DVD of the unrated movie.

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.