Johnny Guitar opens with a man passing between two explosions. On one side of him, a railroad company dynamites the hills, and on the other, bandits fire their guns robbing a stagecoach. One of these activities is thought to advance civil society, and the other violates it. But to this one man, both explosions are dangerous. Johnny Guitar is a wandering guitar player hired by a woman named Vienna. She runs a saloon out in the desert, some distance away from a frontier town, intending to build a town of her own when the railroad comes in. Two prominent and domineering townspeople, McIvers and Emma Small, incite the rest townspeople against Vienna. They have an apparently stable life on the frontier, but their response to Vienna reveals the fault lines on which they rest. The American western often takes place in the wide-open lands of the west and focuses on a group of people who have ambitions for those lands--at the expense of the indigenous...
"We are in the world, not against it." - Ursula K. Le Guin