Westward the Women

"Westward the Women" may not be the greatest western ever made but it's certainly one of the most unusual and is, indeed, very fine and I'm amazed it isn't better known. The women in question are 140 brides being brought West for for the male townsfolk in a Californian valley on a wagon-train lead by Robert Taylor. The director of the picture was William Wellman and William C. Mellor shot it in crisp black-and-white and it has a fine screenplay by Charles Schnee from a story by none other than Frank Capra.

As wagon-train movies go, it's not only unusual but remarkably robust and full of incident and it deals with the male/female dynamic with a surprising degree of honesty and if you don't think so, remember this was 1951. It's certainly not sentimental and Wellman approaches his subject with much the same documentary-like realism that John Ford brought to "Wagonmaster". In a good supporting cast Denise Darcel and Hope Emerson stand out.