If I Could Remake a Movie, This Would Be It

I've been thinking about some of the great women's films lately. Films like Two Women, which won an Oscar for Sophia Loren; The Women, Clare Booth Luce's tour de force comedy, which has been made three times, and others (it's a short list unfortunately.) One that's often overlooked is MGM's 1951 Westward the Women, starring French actress Denise Darcel as a prostitute trying to turn her life around and Robert Taylor as the man charged with bringing a wagon train of women from Chicago to California's Sacramento Valley to marry lonely ranch hands.

I don't know why the film wasn't a hit. Maybe it was the poster art that has Darcel in an off-the-shoulder blouse - a la Jane Russell in The Outlaw (and that she doesn't actually wear in the film) - that makes it look like a standard-issue oater. Maybe later viewers linked it with Here Come the Brides, a rather awful TV series that ran for three seasons from 1968 to 1970, about a shipload of marriage-minded cuties that sail round the Horn to Seattle. The series, as I recall, focused as much or more on the guys.

But Westward the Women is a gritty pioneer saga and one of my all-time favorites. Produced by the legendary Dore Shary and directed by William A. Wellman, who had previously directed such films as The Ox-Bow Incident, Battleground, A Star is Born (which he also wrote), and Across the Wide Missouri, it is the women's equivalent to John Wayne's Three Godfathers, Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, and with maybe a touch of Henry Fonda's My Darling Clementine. It's a classic.

To begin with the women are believable types: prostitutes and widows, young and middle-aged, plain and lovely, American and immigrant. They are women with not-so-rosy pasts who are

willing to face a trek through dangerous territory for the chance at a better life. Along the way they face dust storms, hostile Indians, flash floods, rattlesnakes, and abandonment by most of the cowboys charged with seeing them safely to California. Women die along the way, one is raped, a child is killed, a child is born. But through it all they learn to pull together and regain their self-respect.

Wellman worked hard to make this a believable story. Before filming, he took the scores of actresses who would make up the cast out into the desert for three weeks and taught them all to credibly shoot a gun, crack a whip, drive a team of horses, change a wagon wheel, and more. Costuming (outside of promotional photos) was utilitarian and authentically of the period. Filming was dirty, sweaty, and grueling. But the result successfully captured the conditions on the California trail and what women went through in moving west.

It's a terrific movie, with a sweet ending. Maybe now is the time to tell this story again.