Johnny Guitar shows off Ray’s talent for transforming intractable material into a highly personal work of art. Joan Crawford plays a saloonkeeper, Vienna, whose financial savvy makes her fellow townspeople queasy. Under the baton of rancher Emma (Mercedes McCambridge), whose ancient jealousy of Vienna knows no bounds, the community is orchestrated into a lynch mob. Sterling Hayden's Johnny Guitar is an unlikely hero at best, a laconic gunman who is forced by virtue of conscience and intelligence to take a stand against the real enemy: insidious mob psychology fueled by an outrageous sexual hypocrisy.