John Ford (1966)
Ridiculous, even though it’s also noteworthy – as John Ford’s last feature and because, as the title suggests, the cast, most unusually in his work, is predominantly female. Set in 1935 on the border between North China and Mongolia, the story’s main character is a doctor, who arrives at a Christian mission to bring urgently-needed medical help to the community the mission serves, and to turn the world of the other women there upside down. This chain-smoking, trouser-wearing newcomer is immediately surprising because she’s a woman – and is soon shocking, in her lack of religious belief and impatience with the missionaries’ whole way of life. Patricia Neal was to play the doctor; shortly after shooting began, she suffered the major stroke from which she made such a remarkable recovery, and was replaced by Anne Bancroft. The Far East setting of 7 Women does little to alter the Western schema with which Ford so often worked. The doctor is known only by her initials and they are D and R: she is pretty well The Woman With No Name but Anne Bancroft is, to a greater extent, playing John Wayne. Dr D R Cartwright startles her variously timorous companions with her slangy straight-talking and her lack of compromise; leading by example, she gives the meek, embattled locals the courage to resist their oppressors – a bandit gang led by one Tunda Khan (Mike Mazurki). The bandits are a hybrid of sinisterly-clad bad-guys-riding-into-town and Injuns, barbarically destructive and deafening in their malignant laughter. (An orientalised Woody Strode is the gang’s most striking member.)
The film does reflect one departure from the traditional Western ethos. Although the procrastinating effect of Christian conscience might be ridiculed in a small-town American setting – in the form of a milksop padre, say – the faith of God-fearing women wouldn’t be. By contrast, the missionary life is presented in 7 Women as an evasion of the real world and, in the case of the mission head, Agatha Andrews, as pathological. This effect is created partly by making Andrews a creepy repressed lesbian and partly by the casting of a British actress, Margaret Leighton, in the role. Her accent is used for its alien quality – to emphasise that Andrews is cut off from the earthy reality embodied by the Bancroft character. Dr Cartwright is quite a farrago of theatrical hand-me-downs, however. She’s the stranger who comes among a moribund community in order to expose the frailties and illusions of its members. Eventually, she makes a Christ-like sacrifice to save the others (a woman’s gotta do …): Cartwright is described at one point as the ‘ransom’ to be paid. The movie was shot on a sound stage rather than on location. The structure of the story and what’s more or less a single set combine to make 7 Women sometimes feel like a stage play – a mid-twentieth century morality play, in which characters serially explain and reconsider their outlook on life.
Anne Bancroft looks good until she changes into the geisha outfit required for her climactic self-sacrifice, in which she looks hilarious. Otherwise, she’s a bit too eager delivering Cartwright’s putdowns of the others, which underlines the obviousness of the dialogue. As the tortured Agatha Andrews, Margaret Leighton’s playing is melodramatically calculated – she slows everything down. Leighton casts such a pall over each scene she appears in that the other women should lose patience with Agatha much sooner than they actually do. On the whole, the characterisations are effective in inverse proportion to their surface intensity. Mildred Dunnock, as Andrews’ timid but observant sidekick, gives by some way the most varied and interesting performance. Flora Robson does well enough, as the head of a neighbouring mission. The other members of the septet are Sue Lyon, Betty Field and Anna Lee. As the sole white male around, Eddie Albert is deeply miscast – he plays a mission teacher called Charles Pether, who becomes a real man only by paying the ultimate price. It’s painful to watch Albert having to suppress his natural wit and exuberance: his (offstage) death is almost a relief, except that it brings on another hysterical outburst from Betty Field, as Pether’s pregnant widow. This is one of several points in 7 Women where you feel you already know the lines by heart (‘Who will provide for us now my husband’s gone?’, ‘God will provide’, ‘Don’t talk to me about God!’ and so on.) The entertaining music by Elmer Bernstein expresses the cultural confusion of the material – it lurches from east to west to Deep South and back again in the space of a few bars. The screenplay was adapted by Janet Green and John McCormick from Chinese Finale, a short story by Norah Lofts.
29 July 2013
