A tough, noirish ride through the hard, unforgiving face of the American west, Forty Guns stars Barbara Stanwyck as Jessica Drummond, a despotic matriarch whose posse of (forty) hired guns overrun weak-willed sheriff Ned Logan (Dean Jagger) to make her de facto leader of Cochise County. But when gunslinger-turned-Marshall Griff arrives to restore law and order, Jessica falls for the new lawman, sending her thugs to intervene in his marriage to a female gunsmith. In a climactic stand-off, Griff is finally forced to break his vow of non-violence.