13 Essential Female-Led Westerns

“Johnny Guitar” (1954)
Of all the women of the classic Western, there were really only two whose star personas suited the kind of a raw, man’s-world roles the genre could occasionally throw up, as relief from all the quivering damsels, saloon-bound prostitutes and wifeable good girls elsewhere. Barbara Stanwyck was one, and Joan Crawford, star of Nicholas Ray‘s excellent “Johnny Guitar” was another. More than a match for the title character, played by Sterling Hayden (though their love story subplot does send up sparks) Crawford’s Vienna is the undoubted star of this show, title be damned. A strong-willed saloon keeper with an almost frightening aura of sexual authority, Vienna is mistrusted by the townsfolk and almost paranoiacally disliked by local landowner Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge). Famously, the two women loathed each other in real life too, and perhaps the verisimilitude of the vitriol between them is one reason that “Johnny Guitar” feels far more involved in female conflict and ideas of “proper” femininity,  than it does in the heterosexual romance.

“The Homesman” (2014)
A movie as ornery and gruff as its director/star Tommy Lee Jones’ “The Homesman” sadly continued a long run of box-office underperformance for the recent films of Hilary Swank. It’s really not fair, because though it’s oddly paced and uneven, it is superbly performed, and builds to a completely unexpected, and unexpectedly devastating climax. Swank plays the capable yet plain, unmarried (and as an early scene suggests, unmarriageable) Mary Bee Cuddy, who agrees to escort three “mad women” (Miranda Otto, Grace Gummer, Sonja Richter) whom their husbands have disowned, across dangerous territory to the woman who will shelter them (Meryl Streep in a small cameo). She hires/bribes drunken claims jumper Briggs (Jones) to accompany her and a grudgingly respectful bond forms between them, which all seems like par for the course until it abruptly is not. Narrative shocks and twists aside, Jones directs with real flair here (the filmmaking is more assured than his great “Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” even if overall it is not as satisfying), and there’s something surprisingly sensitive and sympathetic in his portrayal of the male-coded West as a place that regularly drives its womenfolk insane.

“7 Women” (1966)
A reworking of classic Western archetypes on several fronts, John Ford‘s final film may lack subtlety but it packs a punch. Substituting a Mongolian warlord and his marauding gang for the usual “Red Indian” scare, the more dramatic reversal is that Ford brings his muscular style to an almost entirely female cast, even riffing on classic archetypes like the swaggering, cynical outsider who emerges as the reluctant hero (here played with gravelly cool by Anne Bancroft). Bancroft’s doctor comes to attend to the missionaries in a remote Mongolian outpost, but faces prejudice from the stiffly devout mission leader played by Margaret Leighton, who rules over her small, largely female, empire with an imperious piety that is strongly hinted to be rooted in sexual repression. Deconstructing the masculinity and the Americanness of the genre he pioneered, and also critiquing religious inflexibility despite his own devout Catholicism, “7 Women” is both a cracking story and a fascinating grace note for Ford’s career, that sees him approach his recurrent themes with a distinctly revisionist wisdom, and maybe even redress a few old mistakes.

A few other Westerns featuring female protagonists that almost made the cut are: the Coens’ “True Grit” although we just didn’t really feel like Hailee Steinfeld, good as she is, actually leads the movie; Samuel Fuller‘s “Forty Guns” which also stars Western superheroine Barbara Stanwyck; 1995 TV movie “Buffalo Girls” in which Anjelica Huston plays Calamity Jane; William Wellman’s “Westward the Women” in which a wagon train of “marriageable” females is brought out to supply a woman-starved town in the West; and straight to video title “The Desperate Trail,” just because this is a list about strong women leads and they don’t get much stronger than Linda Fiorentino (alongside Sam Elliott). There are also those who classify Anthony Minghella‘s “Cold Mountain” as a western, in which case it could qualify, but it feels more of a war film/epic journey/love story to us.

And then there’s the hall of dishonor, because this twist on the eternally malleable Western genre has thrown up its fair share of stinkers too, among them “Bandidas” “Duel in the Sun,” “Sweetwater” with January Jones, “Bad Girls” with Drew Barrymore and its black counterpart “Gang of Roses” with Li’l Kim and Stacey Dash.

Any others that you think we should check out? Let us know below.