"I'm not interested in you, it's your trade I'm interested in. Let me see it": a gun-fondling Barbara Stanwyck comesright to the point, every time, in Forty Guns, and so does Samuel Fuller. He leaves no Freudian stoneunturned in this guns-as-phallus Western, but it's more complicated, and more interesting, than that. Theclash/clinch between Barbara Stanwyck's ruthless Arizona ranch-owner and Barry Sullivan's Federalgunslinger is the story of How the Shrew Was Tamed. Nicholas Garnham writes in his book Samuel Fuller,"When (Griff (Sullivan)) shoots down Jessica (Stanwyck), one of the central myths of the frontier-thenoble cowboy knight defending the honor of American womanhood-crumbles before our eyes. Forty Guns isprobably the supreme anti-Western...The frontier is the place where the poison of violence enters thebloodstream of America...In Fordian terms the wil- derness overruns the garden...the children of Americaare seen to be irrevocably formed by violence, warped by that failure of love that lies at the heart of indi-vidualism and turns us all into freaks."