Barbara Stanwyck plays a ruthless Arizona ranch-owner and Barry Sullivan a Federal gunslinger in this bizarre psychological Western. In his days as a critic, Godard wrote a laudatory review of Forty Guns for Cahiers du cinema, in which he called the film "so rich in invention - despite an incomprehensible plot - and so bursting with daring conceptions that it reminds one of the extravagances of Abel Gance and Stroheim, or purely and simply of Murnau." In his book, "Samuel Fuller," Nicholas Garnham writes about Fuller's influence on the modern cinema, "secondhand, through the works of Godard": "...in Breathless, his first feature, (Godard) copies the shot looking down the rifle-barrel. When preparing Les Carabiniers he said he wanted to shoot it like a Fuller war movie. In Pierrot le Fou Sam Fuller appears, as himself, and briefly states his definition of the cinema, a definition which becomes the motto for Godard's movie. ('The film is like a battleground.... Love... Hate... Action... Violence... Death....') Made In USA is dedicated to Nick and Samuel - Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller,' whose pupil I am in terms of sight and sound'.... "... Of course Godard admires Hawks, but his heroes and heroines share, not Hawks's limited moral certainty, but Fuller's desperate confusion. Dialectic and paradox are as fundamental to Godard's world as to Fuller's. Godard's heroes, like Fuller's, are pickpockets and prostitutes, double agents or men and women fleeing conventional society."