There’s not a conventional moment to be found in this, another strange and endlessly analyzable genre film from writer/director Sam Fuller. It’s a pulpy B-western that delivers the groceries just fine in terms of action and gunplay, but it’s also a winding art film with weirdo style flourishes and kinky character relationships. A 50 year old Barbara Stanwyck, still sexy and loaded with screen presence, gets one of the meatiest roles ever for a woman in a classic western as a cattle baroness who presides over a gang of forty men (ie., the “forty guns”, or the “forty pricks”, as Sam Fuller later remarked, though this film’s gun/phallus metaphors are plain enough that you don’t need Fuller’s quote to get it). Whether clad entirely in black and charging across the range on a white horse or sitting at the head of an amusingly long dining table (enough for forty men + one) and projecting the air of a crime boss, she’s as cool as they come, and everyone’s afraid of her.
Except for our hero, crack shot US marshal Griff Bonell (Barry Sullivan), who manages to fall in love with her while rolling through town to arrest one of her men for robbing a mail stagecoach.