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I love this movie so much

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Barbara Stanwyck (hard as nails) plays a powerful rancher with political ties near Tombstone whose hired hands, mostly crooked and lead by her own brother, bring her together with Barry Sullivan of the U.S. Attorney General's office, out to arrest one of her boys for robbery. Surprisingly brutal and adult western from Globe Enterprises and distributed by Twentieth Century-Fox, written and directed by Samuel Fuller as if he were trying to find a place for every western cliché in the filmmaker's manual. Joseph Biroc's moody black-and-white cinematography gives the proceedings an intensity that elevates the script, even as Fuller's staging--particularly the gun-blazing confrontations--typically run the gamut from florid to outrageous. Sullivan is sturdy (and colorless) as usual; Stanwyck has this type of role down pat. **1/2 from ****

Definitely one of the worst westerns ever made, it's even on par with 5 Card Stud.The writing here is absolutely pathetic and you wonder how Stanwyck, Sullivan and others allowed themselves to be in such an awful movie.The 40 Guns has absolutely no relevance here. The plot is pathetically drawn. Let's hear about the deputy stealing mail, and the obsessive relationship between Stanwyck and her brother.Instead, we are subjected to ruffians shooting up a town, and shots being fired all over the place. It's a wonder that more people didn't drop from all the firing.What is the meaning of this picture? Who wrote such garbage?

I couldn't help but to be disappointed with Forty Guns, which sold itself to be starring Barbara Stanwyck as the leader of a pack of forty outlaws. I expected a lot more action, especially from Stanwyck. But considering she was 50 years old when she made this, I really should have had lowered expectations. She was more of a figurehead - a don, like Marlon Brando in The Godfather. I don't think he got to shoot people either. I was also disappointed that this wasn't too feminist, considering its synopsis. Sure Stanwyck got to crack a whip and order some men around, but she also fell for some man, and got her heart broken, and still threw herself at him anyway. And I got a little lost with the plot, which involved indistinguishable brothers doing bad stuff and/or getting shot, which set up for feuds. Still, it's hard to dislike a Barbara Stanwyck movie. Even when it's bad, she still brings class to it.

In Martin Scorcese's 'A Personal Journey Through American Movies' you can hear him, in his overview of Samuel Fuller, mention "Forty Guns" as one of his favorites. But he's not sure why."'Forty Guns' is--well--I don't know what the hell 'Forty Guns' is!" he barks.Okay well, at last I know what he means by his statement. How did I like it? Well, it left me rather ambivalent. Didn't affect me strongly either way. Its like a soup with a mixture of things in it: some likable; some not; but the broth itself adequate.There are a few interesting moments where I appreciated Fuller's visual compositions; or his sense of timing and story flow. The overall story (his creation) was inventive; as was the odd arrangement of his characters and the way he wrote their parts "against" the usual western clichés.But its simply a very weird movie; somewhat unsatisfying, I'm bound to say. Sometimes it seems like a noir-western; sometimes a noir/musical/western, sometimes a romance/family-drama/noir/musical/western.Definitely the the places where one character breaks out into song, are unsettling. And Dean Jagger's bizarre lovelorn scene with Stanwyck towards the end--where did that come from? Essentially, every character is somehow bent and twisted around by the screenplay to overturn and go against whatever they happened to be about; when first you are introduced to them. The sheriff is not what he seems; the town rowdy is not what he seems; the town tamers are not what they seem; the lady rancher is not what she seems. A bathhouse operator turns out to be a chorus boy. A gunsmith is a pretty young blond. A tornado cleaves through the middle of the film.What I'm trying to say is: not only is the internal structure here strange; and not only is the western 'world' surrounding the characters strange...but the total way in which events play out in the narrative, has all sorts of distortion and grotesqueness about it. Its a surreal film. Jack-in-the-Box type film, quirky, bumpy, and uneven.Casting was well done though; with actors I don't usually get a chance to see. Gene Barry, etc. Of course this is a Babs Stanwyck picture but surprisingly she doesn't have that much to perform here.At the end of it all I have no idea what Fuller was trying to convey with this western; perhaps it was all just a way of skewering sacred cows and infecting the genre with his own sense of humor.'Forty Guns' is decent but I'd not go out of my way to ever watch it again. Unlike Scorcese, it won't make my favorites list. But it was worth seeing.