Forty Guns (1957, Samuel Fuller) **

Fuller is nearly peerless in his volcanic filling of the CinemaScope frame, but shouldn't a former journalist's scripts be more organized? This heavily sexualized frontier is loaded with double entendres, clever more than erotic (the leads don't spark together), adding up to historical curiosity rather than Freudian classic. Time Out Film Guide calls Forty Guns the "essence of American action cinema," and in its favoring of sharply visualized incident over lucidity or analysis, it did help -- for better and worse -- clear the path to a genre mired in shorthand.