13 Essential Female-Led Westerns

This week shall be marked in the annals as the one when Jane finally got a gun. After what seems like years of squabbles, director changes, acrimony and delay, the Natalie Portman-produced “Jane Got A Gun” is saddling up and trotting into theaters. How much the film will bear the scars of its notoriously troubled production is yet to be seen. Although its tempting to speculate about “what ifs” regarding the original, Lynne Ramsay-directed version, at the very least it should be interesting to see what replacement director Gavin O’Connor, along with stars Portman, Joel Edgerton, Noah Emmerich and Ewan MacGregor, have managed to make of this curate’s egg. Whether the fact that it opens tomorrow and is not screening for press is telling or not is for you to decide.

In the meantime: considering it’s a genre so deeply associated with men, manliness and man’s-gotta-do, classic westerns display a fairly healthy tradition of the female-fronted variety. We’ve selected 13 of the most notable below, and should ‘Jane’ disappoint, we can recommend any of them (some more than others) to restore your faith.

“The Furies” (1950)
A masterpiece from genre giant Anthony Mann, “The Furies” gives the great Barbara Stanwyck a role that categorically no other actress could have done similar justice to. As Vance, the willful and adored daughter of mythic rancher TC (a barnstorming Walter Huston), their close, conspiratorial and mutually admiring/abrasive relationship has the passion of a romance. But it turns violently sour when a jealous Vance disfigures TC’s gold-digging girlfriend (Judith Anderson) — a novel could be written about the interaction between these two women and the different modes of “strong” womanhood they represent. Mann’s beautiful film is astonishingly complex, working in love stories, territorial disputes and racial tensions as well as women’s issues and generational rivalry, but it mostly becomes a portrait of the monolithic Old West, represented by TC’s godlike behavior (he even prints his own money) giving way to the new. And this is the Western heroine done right — Vance is complicated and rarely “good,” but she’s as much made of fire and determination as any male counterpart, and unafraid to use her every resource to get what she wants. Which is: everything.

“Meek’s Cutoff” (2011)
Kelly Reichardt‘s exceptionally graceful, considered Western is polarizing: there are those who judge it as simply too slow to fully invest in. But Reichardt’s specialty is a slightly hyperreal, slowed-down atmosphere, heavy with uneasy mood and portent, and that’s what ‘Meek’s Cutoff” delivers, despite her almost procedural focus on the rough, unglamorous business of living, especially traveling, in the Old West. Michelle Williams plays Emily, the most outspoken (yet frequently ignored) woman in a wagon train of three settler families who have hired mountain man (and possible self-mythologizing fabulist) Steven Meek (a brilliant Bruce Greenwood) to guide them through the treacherous Midwest. It’s Meek’s hubris that gets them stranded, but Reichardt’s subtle focus on the bonnet-wearing women (including Zoe Kazan and Shirley Henderson) gives the movie its novel perspective. Rich and allusive (the divides the film slowly reveals are not just along gender lines, but political and ideological ones too), this is a movie to experience rather than simply consume — baking in the heat, shivering in the cold and aching at the frustration of being lost in an environment that’s hostile in every conceivable way.

“Hannie Caulder” (1971)
That this British-made, Raquel Welch-starring western is an avowed influence on Quentin Tarantino‘s “Kill Bill” speaks volumes about “Hannie Caulder,” both good and bad. Similarly placing a widowed woman at the heart of a story of revenge, ‘Caulder’ unfolds along very familiar lines, as after being gang raped following the murder of her husband, Hannie is taken under the wing of a legendary bounty hunter (Robert Culp, the film’s MVP) and taught how to shoot. Never the strongest actor, Welch is a bland if beautiful presence, self-conscious with her pithy putdowns —like the calfskin britches she wears, the role feels shrunk to fit her. It’s also tonally awkward, with the raping, murdering, stealing trio of brothers who are the film’s villains (led by Ernest Borgnine) uncomfortably and unaccountably played for laughs whenever they’re not raping, murdering or stealing. Yet the film is an easy watch (Christopher Lee and Diana Dors pop up in small roles), and deserves consideration, if only as an artifact of a muddled cinematic “feminism” that existed prior to the semi-revolutionary developments of the 1970s.