Don’t Fence Her In: On Women of the West

Making things more complicated, it is filthy lucre that allows women to gain power in these westerns and escape their conventional roles as civilizers and domesticators, as love interests to be protected, rescued, fought over, or avenged. With the arrival of civilization’s companions, capitalism and vice, women could become owners of saloons or gambling halls, like Charlie or her compatriots played by Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar (1954), Ruth Roman in Anthony Mann’s The Far Country (1954), and Rhonda Fleming in Allan Dwan’s Tennessee’s Partner (1955). They could control ranches, like Veronica Lake in André de Toth’s Ramrod (1947), Barbara Stanwyck in The Furies (1950) and Forty Guns (1957), and Marlene Dietrich in Rancho Notorious (1952). They can hire men to work and fight for them—or seduce them into doing their bidding. In Ramrod, Lake’s steely femme fatale tells her father that she’s going to make her own way in the world, “and being a woman, I won’t need to use guns.”

The price for power comes high, and several of these women pay with their lives. But for all their moral corruption and destructive ambition, they are not out-and-out villains but complex characters who have fought hard for what they have and will fight dirty to hold on to it. Schooled by years of watching gamblers wreck themselves at her tables, Charlie believes that every man has his price. When her interlocutor responds that some men don’t believe that, she shoots back, “But every woman knows it.”

In the vast, empty stillness of the prairie, approaching hoofbeats sound like distant thunder. A column of forty men comes sweeping down at full gallop: leading them on a white steed, dressed all in black, is a woman whose regal posture declares her the ruler of all she surveys. In Forty Guns, writer-director Samuel Fuller gave Barbara Stanwyck one of her great star entrances, and a role that seems like a tribute to and summation of her screen persona.

No other actress of her time starred in more westerns, beginning with her portrayal of the titular sharpshooter in Annie Oakley (1935), up through her role as the matriarch of TV’s The Big Valley (1965–1969). The Brooklyn-bred Stanwyck loved making westerns, both for their mythology of self-reliance and for the chance they gave her to flaunt her bold, fearless physicality. (Famously, in Forty Guns she took Fuller’s dare and let herself be dragged by a horse with one foot caught in a stirrup.) Her two best forays into the genre both cast her as iron-willed ranch queens of titanic ambition, who are also women capable of introspection and changes of heart. Anthony Mann’s The Furies bears the stamp of writer Niven Busch, the maestro of neurotic, overheated, Greek-tragedy-inspired western melodramas (he also penned Duel in the Sun [1946] and Pursued [1947]), along with Mann’s taste for inky, high-contrast noir cinematography, Shakespearean drama, and shockingly cruel violence.

In Forty Guns, Stanwyck is Jessica Drummond, “the boss of Cochise County.” The film is really about an Earp-like trio of brothers, led by itinerant lawman Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan), who come to town to make an arrest. But what everyone who has seen the movie remembers is Stanwyck, who at fifty makes Jessica towering (Fuller’s widescreen framing and camera movements help the petite actress effortlessly dominate her surroundings), but also dryly funny, ruefully wise, and extremely sexy. The other thing everyone remembers is the outrageous sexual innuendo that rings every possible change on the Freudian potential of firearms. (The film’s other major female character works in her father’s shop, making rifles, allowing for some absurdly suggestive dialogue as she is courted by one of Griff’s brothers. He: “I never kissed a gunsmith before.” She: “Any recoil?”)

The forty guns of the title refer to the forty men Jessica has on her payroll, seen riding behind her or arrayed around an immensely long dinner table where she presides at the head. Fuller loved the idea of a woman who “commands and men obey,” as the film’s ballad announces, and all the double entendres that tie guns to masculinity only amplify the sense that she controls these hired hands body and soul. Putting men in their place was always one of Stanwyck’s specialties; Forty Guns has its share of scenes where she humiliates or belittles them, yet she is never portrayed as an emasculating harpy. Her blunt dismissal of the right-hand man who loves her gives a chilling sense of someone disgusted by weakness, but she immediately turns on a dime and reveals her own vulnerability as she finds herself in love for the first time.

Vienna, the saloon owner played by Joan Crawford in Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, has only four men working for her, but if her domain is smaller than Jessica’s, she surveys it with no less pride. She is first seen standing on a second-story landing overlooking her namesake saloon, dressed like a gunfighter in tight pants and a black shirt fastened with a string tie. Soon she will add a gun-belt, slung rakishly around her hips. With her short-cropped hair and ramrod posture, her burning eyes and scarlet gash of lipstick, she cuts a formidable, androgynous figure. “Vienna’s” is unlike any other movie saloon: a lofty church-shaped space, elegantly appointed, one wall of which is the raw, red rock of a mountainside. Looking down at her three dealers in green eyeshades, standing sentinel beside their gambling tables, she orders one to spin the wheel—because she likes the sound.

“Never met a woman who was more a man,” the dealer says of his boss, walking towards the camera and directly addressing the viewer. “She thinks like one, acts like one, and sometimes makes me feel I’m not.”

But after Vienna’s long-absent lover Johnny (Sterling Hayden) shows up in her place, she appears in the middle of the night wearing a low-cut, retina-searing fuchsia nightgown. As they rake over the smoldering embers of their memories, their dialogue takes on an incantatory rhythm, as though they were quoting lines of poetry to each other, speaking past each other out of their private reveries. He tells her that she should forget the past and dismiss the five years of their separation like a bad dream. But for her the hurts and humiliations she has endured are still raw, so fresh and bitter she can taste them.

Deliriously stylized and subversively gender-bending, Johnny Guitar tramples the genre boundaries of the western like cattle stampeding over a fallen fence. Vienna gambles on getting rich when the railroad, currently being blasted through the mountains, turns her isolated saloon into a bustling whistle-stop. She is opposed by Emma (Mercedes McCambridge), whose family owns the local bank and who leads a posse of men to lynch her rival. Though Vienna accuses Emma of being jealous over an outlaw called the Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady), her taunt—“You want the Kid, and you’re so ashamed you want him dead”—sounds more like a diagnosis of Emma’s feelings for Vienna: an obsessive hatred with a distinctly erotic edge. With her shrill voice, bared teeth, and tiny eyes glittering with bloodlust, Emma is a figure of such grotesque sadism that she finally repels even her followers.

Johnny Guitar is filled with moments of inspired lunacy, like Vienna in a billowing white dress calmly playing the piano while a lynch mob seethes around her. This is a world of constant violence—explosions, raging flames, bullets, and nooses—and also of enchantment, where a waterfall is the gateway to a secret refuge. Aside from Vienna and Emma, not a single woman appears in the movie, and by the end the men on both sides fall back and let them fight it out, recognizing that the feud has always been between them alone. Their climactic showdown was not the movies’ first distaff gunfight: saloon owner Joan Leslie and outlaw Audrey Totter faced off the year before in Allan Dwan’s delightfully bonkers Woman They Almost Lynched (1953), set in a Civil War border town ruled by a tough female mayor. Johnny Guitar even breaks with tradition by having its title ballad sung at the end, and by a woman—Peggy Lee, no less.

Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious opens with a basso booming out a song about “hate, murder, and revenge!” The main plot follows Vern (Arthur Kennedy), a man obsessively fixated on avenging the rape and murder of his fiancée. But the real heart of this luridly colored psychodrama lies with Marlene Dietrich’s Altar Keane. We first see her as a garishly painted dance-hall girl, perched on the back of a male patron on all fours, competing in a raucous “horse race.” The image recalls the role that revived Dietrich’s slumping career, as Frenchy, a zesty, rowdy saloon singer in Destry Rides Again (1939)—a comic western that ends with a mob of women marching in with rakes and hoes and cleaning up the town in a giant brawl. Fired from a saloon when she objects to being pawed, Altar puts all her savings on a Chuck-a-luck wheel and wins a fortune—with the help of a gunfighter who knows the wheel is fixed. With her winnings she buys a ranch where she gives refuge to outlaws and bandits in exchange for a cut of their loot.

The long opening sequence of Johnny Guitar introduces all the major characters in a fluidly shifting, often very funny series of challenges and showdowns—fistfights and displays of fancy shooting, but also dances and guitar solos—fueled by each person’s need to prove their prowess or measure up against a rival. With the film’s flamboyant, theatrical confrontations, Ray exposes the feverish anxiety that always surrounded the stylized and highly scrutinized performance of masculinity in westerns. The revelation that the stance, mannerisms, and attitude of the archetypal man of the West could be donned like clothing, even by women, was just one of the shocks that began destabilizing genre myths, as noir westerns placed the first charges for fully revisionist blasts that would follow.

The Wild West became a reenactment of itself even before it was really over, its rituals formalized in shooting contests and rodeos that convert deadly battles into entertainment. Though overwhelmingly male affairs, they made room for the occasional woman like the historical Annie Oakley, who joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show as a sharpshooter, or Rosemary (Maria Hart), the trick-rider who travels with the rodeo in Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1952). Grossly mistitled by RKO head Howard Hughes, this is one of Ray’s loveliest, most achingly heartfelt portraits of Americans adrift in a transient world, filled with “broken bones, broken bottles, broken everything.”

is not exactly a western or a film noir, though it has aspects of both. Its critique of the destructive waste spawned by men’s need to prove themselves and assert their mastery make it a kind of anti-western.

Jeff soon hooks up with a young couple, Wes and Louise Merritt (Arthur Kennedy and Susan Hayward), coaching the ranch-hand Wes as he embarks on the rodeo circuit. Louise deplores the whole project, and blames Jeff for luring her husband into the pursuit of fast money and fame. She plays the most traditional woman’s role: seeking the security of a home and a “decent, steady life,” and urging her restless, ambitious man to settle down. It’s a role that often makes female characters seem like killjoys and enforcers of bourgeois values. But Louise is no simpering model housewife; Susan Hayward was another tough-minded expert at cutting men down to size. When Jeff coos that she is “real little with your shoes off,” she shoots back, “You’re real little with your shoes on.”

She is unimpressed by the rodeo scene with its promise of thrills and fancy belt-buckles, and the film takes her side, revealing a sad, tawdry world of dusty trailer parks where women have to wash at outdoor pumps, full of men with hideous injuries forcing themselves back into the ring to prove they’re not afraid. Jeff falls in love with Louise for her grounded, plain-spoken certainty about what she wants, and she gradually comes to trust his gentle competence as Wes becomes a cocky, philandering drunk. But most of all, Louise’s desire to settle down has a tremendous force of inconsolable yearning. She grew up without any fixed abode, the daughter of migrant fruit-pickers. Ray, whose films are marked by fleeting idylls in which characters play house, said The Lusty Men was “really a film about people who want a home of their own. That was the great American search at that time.”

Westerns are forever caught between two conflicting American dreams—the longing for unfettered freedom, and the longing for home and community. Traditionally, this has been posed as the dilemma of men, but some noir westerns dared to admit that women too might crave more than hearth and family. Few classic-era westerns are entirely satisfying from a feminist standpoint—even the most female-dominated—since those in which women transgress against norms usually end with the mavericks either dead or tamed by love. But seven decades later these rule-breaking films still feel thrillingly bold, and the women in them, grappling with the tensions between autonomy and acceptance, ambition and conscience, are true pioneers.