When a lynch mob comes for saloon owner Vienna (a sizzling Joan Crawford), wrongly accusing her of murder, she doesn't need a man to defend her.

Nicholas Ray’s mesmerisingly strange western takes the stock idea of ranchers trying to keep out newcomers and turns it into a heady allegorical fable about xenophobic persecution centred on the sexual rivalries of saloon owner Vienna (Joan Crawford) and repressed, vengeful Emma Smalls (Mercedes McCambridge). It’s a splendid, elemental drama ripe for feminist, Freudian and Marxist interpretation (BFI). Snubbed by American critics and audiences alike upon its original release, it found fans in Europe, notably François Truffaut, who hailed it “a Western dream,” and Almodóvar, who references the film in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.