Blu-ray, DVD Release: Forty Guns

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Dec. 11, 2018
Price: DVD $22.06, Blu-ray $26.61
Studio: Kino Lorber

Hollywood legend Barbara Stanwyck (1953’s Titanic) saddled up with writer-director Samuel Fuller (The Naked Kiss) for 1957’s Forty Guns, the pulp maestro’s most audacious western, a boldly feminist spin on the genre that pivots effortlessly between ribald humor, visceral action, and disarming tenderness.

High-riding rancher Jessica Drummond (Stanwyck) commands a forty-strong posse of cowboys, ruling Cochise County, Arizona, without challenge. When U.S. marshal Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan) and his brothers arrive in town with a warrant for one of her hired guns, Jessica begins to fall for the lawman even as he chips away at her authority.

With astonishing black-and-white CinemaScope photography, hard-boiled dialogue laced with double entendres, and a fiery performance by Stanwyck at her most imperious, Forty Guns is a virtuoso display of Fuller’s sharpshooting talents.

Criterion’s new editions of the film contain the following:

* New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
* New interview with director Sam Fuller’s widow, Christa Lang-Fuller, and daughter, Samantha Fuller
* A Fuller Life (2013), a feature-length documentary by Samantha Fuller about her father, featuring admirers and collaborators Wim Wenders, William Friedkin, Mark Hamill, James Franco, Monte Hellman, Jennifer Beals, Bill Duke, Constance Towers, and others
* New interview with critic Imogen Sara Smith, author of In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City
* Stills gallery
* An essay by film scholar Lisa Dombrowski and excerpts from Fuller’s 2002 autobiography, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking