Name a classic Western of the 1950s starring a great actress of the 1930s. She should play a woman of power and influence, maybe with a little bit of a dominatrix vibe. (When critics talk about the film, they will probably call it “psychosexual”.) It is highly stylized. Whatever happens in it, it doesn’t take place in the West of the United States sometime between the 1860s and the 1890s, but in the West of Hollywood movies, and it wants you to know that it knows it. Deep down, it is all about sex and violence. Horsewhips feature prominently. And the French New Wave was obsessed with it. Three movies spring to mind: Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious, from 1952, with Marlene Dietrich; Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, from 1954, with Joan Crawford; and Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns, from 1957, with Barbara Stanwyck. That might not be quite enough to constitute a microgenre, but it is remarkable that three such films exist at all. Not that it’s a coincidence: Ray and Fuller both revered Lang, and both certainly had Rancho Notorious in mind when making their own movies. And all three drew on trends that reflected the growing discomfort of the post-war Western: Western noirs, which paint the wide-open range with chiaroscuro shadows, and psychological Westerns, which explored how pioneer virtues such as freedom and self-reliance sour into obsessive greed, lust for power, or rancid cruelty. The post-war years even saw an uptick in films where women owned land and property —Veronica Lake in Ramrod, Agnes Moorehead in Station West, Ruth Roman in The Far Country, Barbara Stanwyck in any of half a dozen roles. The films in question here are doing something stranger and more specific. More than any other entries in the genre (including the others starring Stanwyck), they are interested in their own relationship with the past. Careers such as the ones Crawford, Stanwyck, and Dietrich enjoyed were incredibly rare, even in an era when stars had the full weight of the studio system behind them. (Bette Davis and Katherine Hepburn are the only other examples.) All three started acting in the silent era or very soon after the introduction of sound. They had been stars as long as the medium of film had existed. Their way of acting helped to define what female stardom meant — and by the 1950s it was on the way out. They didn’t do naturalism, like the up-and-coming graduates of the Actor’s Studio. They were not interested in representing the concerns of young people in a decade that was increasingly concerned with youth. Hollywood did not know quite what to do with them. The fear that a changing, civilizing West would have no place for the people who first settled it is a common preoccupation of the darker post-war westerns, and it is common thread in all three films. But nothing as simplistic as actresses playing themselves is taking place here. Like all great stars of their generation, they were able to embody a distinct persona that followed them from role to role — and in each case, that persona is the skeleton around which the rest of the film is built. 
An interviewer, discussing Rancho Notorious, once asked Fritz Lang if he watched many Westerns. “Yes,” he said. “I like Westerns. They have an ethic that is very simple and very necessary. It is an ethic which one doesn’t see now because critics are too sophisticated. They want to ignore that it is necessary to really love a woman and to fight for her.” Remarks like these make me wonder if Lang and I are talking about the same movie. There is a simple ethic at the core of Rancho Notorious, but the love of a woman is a transparent pretext. The chorus of the film’s central ballad says it all: this is a story of hatred, murder, and revenge. We open on a sleepy little town in Wyoming as mild-mannered cattle-hand Vern Haskell (Arthur Kennedy) gives his fiancée a diamond brooch. In short order, she is brutally raped and murdered. The next few years pass by in a couple of on-screen minutes as Vern scours the West for her killer. He only has one clue: the name “Chuck-a-Luck.” Eventually he learns that Chuck-a-luck is a ranch belonging to retired show-girl Altar Keane (Marlene Dietrich). Vern gets himself thrown in Jail with Frenchy (Mel Ferrer), Altar’s lover, and when the two break out Frenchy brings him to the ranch, a hideout for a rotating cast of aging outlaws. Altar is there, wearing Vern’s dead fiancée’s brooch. He tries to seduce her to learn the name of the man who gave it to her and, remarkably, succeeds. The whole thing ends in a gunfight where Altar dies protecting Frenchy and Vern gets his man, far too late for it to make any difference. Marlene Dietrich played a lot of showgirls in her day, on a spectrum from poisonous (The Blue Angel) to noble (Blonde Venus). Somewhere in the middle is the role of Frenchie in Destry Rides Again, from 1939, another western where her character ultimately dies to protect the man she loves. Rancho Notorious is full of nods to her earlier roles — Frenchy’s name, of course, and the flashbacks to Altar in her performing days, riding patrons like horses while wearing eye-popping quantities of fringe. The whole film is fixated on Altar’s past, and by extension Dietrich’s. There’s a scene where she sings the frontier ballad “Black Jack Davy” with her unmistakable throaty Teutonic monotone. We are faced with a strange, layered kind of nostalgia — for the old West, the golden age of Hollywood, and the bacchanals in Weimar cabarets where it always seems that her characters really belonged. Under Lang’s direction, all of it seems to have gone sour. Vern is one of the most comprehensively nasty protagonists to swagger down the main street of Republic Studios’ western set. He lies and manipulates, seduces Altar and coldly reveals
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