Reception
Originally opening to negative reviews, the film later became liked and would regarded as one of Ray's best films, topped by the famous title song.
Variety commented, "It proves should leave saddles and Levis to someone else and stick to city lights for a background. is only a fair piece of entertainment. becomes so involved with character nuances and neuroses, all wrapped up in dialogue, that never has a chance to rear up in the saddle...The people in the story never achieve much depth, this character shallowness being at odds with the pretentious attempt at analysis to which the script and direction devotes so much time."
Bosley Crowther singled out Crawford's physical bearing for criticism in his New York Times review, stating "...no more femininity comes from her than from the rugged Mr. Heflin in "Shane." For the lady, as usual, is as sexless as the lions on the public library steps and as sharp and romantically forbidding as a package of unwrapped razor blades."
The film is beloved of French critics and filmmakers, such as François Truffaut, who described it as the "Beauty and the Beast of Westerns, a Western dream". Truffaut was especially impressed by the film's extravagance: the bold colors, the poetry of the dialogue in certain scenes, and the theatricality which results in cowboys vanishing and dying "with the grace of ballerinas".
Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar pays homage to the film in his 1988 release, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. His lead character Pepa Marcos (Carmen Maura), a voice artist, passes out while dubbing Vienna's voice in a scene where Johnny (voiced earlier by Pepa's ex-lover Iván) and she banter about their conflicted past. Almodovar's film also ends with a chase and an obsessed woman shooting at his lead character.
The Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum lists Johnny Guitar as one of the 100 best American films.
Japanese film director Shinji Aoyama listed Johnny Guitar as one of the Greatest Films of All Time in 2012. He said, "Johnny Guitar is the only movie that I‘d like to remake someday, although I know that it’s impossible. It’s probably closest to the worst nightmare I can have. I know for sure that my desire to remake this movie comes from my warped thought that I want to remake my own nightmare."
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Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)