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Probably the most extreme of these role-switching Westerns was 1954’s campy Johnny Guitar, in which a mannish saloon-operator (Joan Crawford) and a rancher (Mercedes McCambridge) battle over the romantic attentions of Scott Brady as the Dancin’ Kid! There’s also practically any Barbara Stanwyck Western-her ability to dominate all the men around her, yet remain feminine, was unique. In Woman Walks Ahead, Jessica Chastain stars as Brooklyn, New York artist-Indian activist Barbara Weldon, who goes West to paint Sitting Bull’s portrait and is soon caught in the political turmoil of American Indian politics of 1889.
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A disaster leading to a Western town populated almost entirely by women was the premise of the sinister 2014 Lifetime Series Strange Empire, as well as that of When Calls the Heart (yet another mine collapse), a romantic Western series, based on the novel by Janette Oke, which has been laboring with little fanfare on the Hallmark Channel since 2014, and just began its sixth season in December. An exceptionally fine Western, written and directed by Scott Frank, Godless’s success with audiences might be a matter of the third time being the charm. As if Jeff Daniels needed villainy back-up, Kim Coates is the hissable rep for the mining company. The lead rancher who brings everyone together is a widow played by Downton Abbey’s Michele Dockery. The “law” is represented by a wimp sheriff who’s going blind (and his young, likable goofy deputy), and the sheriff is soon replaced by his sister, played by Merritt Wever in an Emmy-winning performance. Here a town has lost nearly all of its men in a gold-mine collapse, and the town’s women have to hold things together, and battle with crazy-evil characters like Frank Griffin (Jeff Daniels, who won an Emmy for the part). Perhaps the most striking example is Godless. In season two of the Sci-Fi-Western, Wood and her female co-stars, Charlotte Hale and Thandie Newton, took center stage of the series storyline. Veteran actress Evan Rachel Wood has twice been nominated for Emmys for her provocative lead role as Dolores Abernathy in HBO’s Westworld. The males by and large are reduced to henchmen and villains. Westworld’s season two is a battle of wits between several female characters, real and robot, played by Evan Rachel Wood, Charlotte Hale and Thandie Newton, who won an Emmy for her performance. In the substantially true story of Woman Walks Ahead, Jessica Chastain’s Barbara Weldon is for a time all that stands between Sitting Bull (Michael Greyeyes) and destruction (Sam Rockwell). But while he and his estranged son, played by Luke Grimes, are the nurturers, it’s his lawyer daughter, played by Kelly Reilly, who’s the real family soldier. As the man who’s built the largest private ranch in America, Yellowstone’s Kevin Costner is at the story’s core. In the current crop of Westerns, the female characters have come so far to the fore that males are now weak, evil or subservient to women.
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Netflix’s award-winning limited series Godless was rich in challenging roles for female actors, including Merritt Wever’s (above, left) Emmy-winning performance as Mary Agnes and Michele Dockery’s provocative interpretation of rancher Alice Fletcher. But 1952’s High Noon, richly borrowed (some might say plagiarized) from The Virginian’s final chapters, started changing the rules: the Mexican widow, played by Katie Jurado, was secretly the power of the town and unlike The Virginian’s cowering schoolmarm, Marshal Will Kane’s Quaker wife turned out to be the only sideman he needed in a shootout. Even though in 1939’s Stagecoach, we preferred the “bad” woman, Claire Trevor’s Dallas, the respectable townswomen were hard at work civilizing their town by running Dallas out of it. Trevor’s blond prostitute seeking society’s-and a man’s- acceptance was an archetype audiences in the 1930s easily recognized, but today has been replaced with a new generation of strong Western women ready to fight to win the West.Įver since The Virginian, Owen Wister’s genre-defining Western novel, female characters have traditionally been portrayed as the civilizers. In 1939, Claire Trevor’s Dallas and John Wayne’s Ringo Kid found solace and love as the two outsiders in John Ford’s classic ensemble Western, Stagecoach.