Westward the Women

The men who have settled a California valley have no women. The founder of the settlement hires a trail boss and sets out to bring a hundred and thirty women from Chicago on a six-month wagon train. The boss does not trust them and does not hide it. There are accidents on the road, deaths, wheels to repair; the survivors learn to drive the herd and the wagons themselves. The subject is not romance but the work. The women are not rescued, they labour; the film shows shooting, driving oxen and burying the dead in detail, and refuses to fit the transformation of the people who manage it into a template. The form is bare. Little music, hard landscape, deaths that arrive unprepared. A child's death is given in a single shot with no explanation. The idea came from an unexpected source: in the 1940s Frank Capra read a magazine piece about women crossing the isthmus in South America to become brides for male settlers, and thought of moving it to the American west. His own studio was not making westerns, so he gave the idea to his friend William A. Wellman, who took it to MGM, and that is how the film got made. Robert Taylor plays the trail boss, with Denise Darcel and Hope Emerson among the women. Who it is for: viewers who like westerns and look for unusual examples of the genre. Who it is not for: anyone who will snag on how the period writes women; the film is progressive, but it belongs to 1951.