Stagecoach by John Ford, Once Upon a Time in the West by Sergio Leone - Research Paper Example

Introduction The traditional Western cinema is often characterized by gender biasedthemes. Film heroics are often attributed to the male protagonists, while supplementary roles are given to female leads. The concept of ‘heroics’ has, for a long time, been denied to women within the Western genre. This tendency reflects how traditional American society views gender, particularly during the period of the American frontier. However, there are a few filmmakers who tried to break free from this tradition. Two of the most prominent filmmakers in Western cinema, John Ford and Sergio Leone, exhibit indirect desires to deviate from traditional gender stereotypes. This essay analyzes how two Western films, namely, Stagecoach and Once upon a Time in the West represent gender and masculinity, and how they embody traditional American society. Stagecoach by John Ford John Ford often elaborates the gender stereotypes of Western films. Disgraced women, like Dallas, are portrayed to be detached from the compassionate, encouraging, and nurturing ideals of family life, whereas wives and mothers usually endure the difficulties of life on the American frontier. They do so not as cultured, urbane Easterners, but as antagonistic women who surprise their men. The male protagonists of Ford also hold civilizing ideologies and exhibit gentleness. The most praiseworthy heroes of Ford also show decorum and dedication to domestic life not usually identified with the Western genre (Grant 10). Conforming to the sense of Victorian culture, masculinity in Ford’s films who grieve for loved ones and deceased wives exhibit a higher ability to value the living and to make a difference in the world (Pearson 23). Regardless of their gender, the characters of Ford usually confront the social, economic, and emotional outcomes of the absence of their family, but Stagecoach indicates that these effects can be especially damaging for a female. At some point in the stagecoach passage to Lordsburg, the town-whore Dallas marches in the moonlight. The Ringo Kid, played by John Wayne, goes after her. He tells her that Apache captures wanderers. “I guess you don’t know how it feels to lose your own folks,” (Studlar & Bernstein 53) he tells her as he tries to explain the reason for his journey to Lordsburg. Dallas narrates how her parents died “in a massacre in the Superstition Mountains” (Studlar & Bernstein 53). He answers, “That’s tough, especially on a girl” (Studlar & Bernstein 53). The sexually naive Ringo, locked up for a long time, does not know that Dallas is a whore. In this particular scene, the viewers are given the chance to understand the sad acceptance reflected on Dallas’s statement (Grant 15): “You have to live, no matter what happens.” Dallas’s disclosures of the slaughter that killed her parents and denied her of a family inform the viewers of the situations that have pushed her into prostitution. Her reputation as a social recluse is shown in the beginning when she was carried away by the town’s Law and Order League. Along the voyage, she is silently avoided by other, more reputable travelers, as well as Mrs. Mallory, the wife of the soldier. Her anxiety, shame, and injured boldness show that she is sexually defiant due to economic need instead of personal liking. But situations also compel Dallas to carry out the task of a nurse for the child of Mrs. Mallory. It is the compassionate character of Dallas that strengthens Ringo’s romantic sentiment. Film scholars have correctly discerned that the “shots of her [Dallas] cradling Lucy’s baby… are quite transgressive, since prostitutes are outside the family and the law” (Cook 44). For Ringo, Dallas is “the kind of girl a man wants to marry” (Cook 44), and the movie bears out his assessment of her instead of society’s judgment. As is widely observed, Ford’s compassion is for outsiders, regardless of their gender, and Stagecoach is not the only Western movie of Ford to grant that compassion to women who, due to their sexual defiance, are treated unkindly by other people. Despite Ford’s commitment to sexual romanticism and respect for family and motherhood, culturally and sexually insolent women can become wives and ‘darlings’ in Ford’s works. The scene in Tonto confirms on a number of levels the relationship between gender and class. While Lucy Mallory is depicted as the figure of refined eastern femininity and mainstream awareness, the town-whore Dallas is portrayed as the obvious contradiction. She is the frontier whore who does not have a family name. No reversal of gender-based social relations or gender-related social roles takes place in Stagecoach. In the movie, women play the role of customary patriarchal mediator between men and as representations of the sexual, the domestic, the private, and the familial (Pearson 25). However, the movie does show that at the American frontier, the relationship of women to patriarchy is figurative and misleading. Hatfield’s respect for Lucy Mallory endows her with a symbolic essence as a female who should be sheltered and defended. Therefore, Mrs. Mallory, as the ‘reputable’ female, apparently has a more positive and advantaged connection to patriarchy than Dallas, who, as a disgraced female, has neither father nor brother nor husband to look after her (Gallagher 147). She has been relegated to the social standing of a shameful, fleeting sexual product. As she is carried away at the beginning of the story, a scene places emphasis on Dallas as she responds to a confrontation in the road; at this point, viewers hear the expression “now my dear lady” (Kozloff 157). Hence, Dallas is initially portrayed with this expression. Whether Dallas is worthy of being called a ‘lady’ will highlight the whole stagecoach voyage to Lordsburg. Dallas identifies the man who said that expression, Doctor Josiah Boone. Doc is a destitute, evicted for failure to pay rent. Dallas is forced to ask him: “Doc, doc… can they make me leave town when I don’t want to? Haven’t I any right to live? What have I done?” (Pearson 21). For Dallas, eviction from the town denies her of any rights. This is a social and moral verdict made by the delegates of the Law and Order League, who are, for Dallas, more terrible than Apaches. Their decision is imposed by the law, but it is not sufficient to throw out Dallas; the League also should tell others to be careful of her. The head of the League, Mrs. Gatewood, advise Nancy Whitney to tell Lucy not to “travel with that creature” (Grant 143). Doctor Boone and Dallas are both social outsiders, but it is the latter who is aimed at in what was traditionally a widespread practice of the 1800s—‘reputable’ women mobilizing to purify frontier community (Grant 143). This poses the issue of whether the eviction of Doc from Tonto was intended or simply a consequence of his accidental interaction with Dallas at this point. Dallas’s sociable relations with Doctor Boone indicate several unpleasant possibilities: He could have treated her for sexually-related illness or he might be a former client of Dallas. The career and educational standing of Doctor Boone should place him in a higher economic and social position, but his apparent failures practically put him at the bottom of the class hierarchy. He is a customer of a labeled “dreg”, but a “proud, glorified dreg” (Grant 143). Both Dallas and Doc are viewed by society’s guardians as fallen people who have to be evicted from civilization. The movie will connect Doc, the disgraced professional, and Dallas, the stray who became a prostitute, throughout the story. Doc becomes Dallas’s advisor and protector. It is he who will persuade Dallas to grab the opportunity and help Ringo run away before they get to Lordsburg (Studlar & Bernstein 56). Doc warns her that Ringo will discover everything about her once they arrive at Lordsburg, for the destination of the voyage guarantees nothing more than a rekindling of her being as a whore. Dallas is shattered, disgraced as a sexual dishonor to women. The inferior status of Dallas as a whore may be viewed as a female defiance or wildness, but her only chance to rebel is when two women mocked her as she unintentionally shows off a stretch of legs as she ascend into the coach. Dallas gives them a mocking grin in an exaggerated way, embellishing her sexual defiance. However, as subversive as it is to include Dallas, the whore, as the love interest of the male protagonist, the movie’s most rebellious deviation from the traditional gender stereotypes of the West is to demonstrate that a prostitute may, and even should, be a wife and a mother. The film even proves that Dallas would be an excellent mother. To support this incredible connection of Dallas to ‘normal’ motherhood, Lucy Mallory is practically separated from her own child. She is totally supplanted by the visual focus on Dallas and the baby. Dallas cuddles the baby and introduces her to the male travelers assembled in the foyer. And it is in this episode that Ringo and Dallas showed their love interest for each other, which results in a marriage proposal. In a traditional way of interpreting gender, Dallas may be simply regarded as a ‘wet-nurse’ to the noble lady, but it is apparent that she emblematically supplants Lucy as the mother rather than simply helping her (Smith 227). The stagecoach was ambushed by the Apaches once it arrived at the salt flats. Dallas protects the baby, cuddles her, looks at her, and, anxious about the baby’s future, begins to cry. On the contrary, there is no hint that Lucy is even concerned about her baby. In this scene, she is locked in the corner of the coach, ignoring her baby. She pleads and is unaware even to the fact that his husband is preparing to kill her to keep her from being captured by the Apaches. The characterization of Dallas and Ringo, and the presentation of gender, adheres to the observation presented with regard to Western arts (Smith 229): “The values that are occasionally found in the West are anomalous instances of conformity to a standard that is actually foreign to the region. This principle is exemplified in the Western heroines, who seem to be worthy of admiration only in proportion as they have escaped from the crudity and vulgarity of their surroundings, either by virtue of birth elsewhere, or through the possession of an implausible innate refinement.” To steer clear of the gender stereotypes that early Western films conform to, Ford’s solution is to have both gender-- Ringo and Dallas-- surface as innate nobles, morally upright individuals who have not been made rude and contemptuous by the debasing social status assigned to them. Once Upon a Time in the West by Sergio Leone Once Upon a Time in the West of Sergio Leone has traditionally been interpreted as a wistful retirement from film’s usual Westerns and their masculine champions. He characterizes a transition from the masculine to the feminine where a ‘world without balls’ (Fawell 76) suggests a realm where females rule, and hence it is appropriate that the main protagonist in the movie is a woman. Paradoxically, his righteous goals to revolutionize established frameworks of the Western film nevertheless strengthen the traditional, patriarchal concern that sees women as crippling entities (Fawell 76). His grief-stricken longing for the machismo values of the early West would appear to require denigrating women as men’s trophies or tamers, thus tearing down young men’s desires to explore and be independent. The prevailing critical analyses of Leone’s film and the Western genres reflect Leone’s obvious paternal fear and bring about misinterpretations of the roles of women in the West. Leone highlights the disappearance of a grand, masculine era (Matheson 58): The climatic dual between Frank, the railroad hit-man who has ambitions to become a businessman, and Harmonica, last of the frontier individualists, is introduced by a solemn discussion about the golden age, shortly to be killed off by opportunists like the railroad baron Morton. “Other Mortons’ll be along, and they’ll kill it off,” Harmonica states. This discussion is punctuated by shots of the railroad gang laying tracks, and has its visual counterpart in the shot on which the film finishes. As the train pulls out of the new town, Harmonica rides off into the hills with the corpse of the bandit Cheyenne in tow. Those whose destiny is to make way for technological advance not only foresee their own fate; they resent it. The concluding scene that links the demise of a golden age to the extermination of ‘frontier individualists’ or heroic men carrying the machismo ideal is the scene where Jill McBain is offering water to the men (Matheson 58). The woeful technological development is associated with the emergence of a self-sufficient, autonomous woman, and it is exactly her role as a financial manager that produces hatred (Cumbow 71). The fact that women, especially independent and strong women, have been the focal point of male hatred is quite known in Western history. In fact, Once Upon a Time in the West commemorates and establishes hatred as masculine in the vindicating character of Harmonica; yet, an analyst’s focus on early resentments only limits a more comprehensive and stronger appreciation of the completely complicated role women play in the movie. The prevailing interpretation of Jill as embodying the new Western frontier exterminating traditional masculinity, and hence eradicating recognized masculine ideologies of the West, exposes what may be regarded as a hidden hatred of women in the Western genre (Frayling 133). Although scholars will agree that the thriving of Jill until the end bestows independence, that independence is nevertheless established as less than perfect or desirable. Some scholars are most indifferent of Jill in their analysis of the movie’s ultimate conclusion. They obviously worship Cheyenne and Harmonica as ultimate male protagonists who carry out the “supreme self-sacrifice because they help create a world that has no room for men like themselves” (Cumbow 73). The survival of Jill is viewed by some scholars as a genuine defeat: “Jill is the only person with a name who survives; those who dig remain a faceless mass. The real personalities die or dissipate” (Cumbow 73). This perspective recognizes the role of Jill and, generally, women, as anything other than influenced or established by gender. Scholars argue that misinterpretations of the roles of women in Western films are the outcome of a failure to dissociate bravery from gender. Oddly enough, as explained by Frayling (2005), Jill as a target of hatred pushes scholars to disregard her role in the movie while simultaneously recognizing its presence by being cautious of it. Analysis of Jill’s character in the movie often relegates her to a submissive character that embodies the unwelcomed transition from male-dominated to female-dominated context. Jill is simply a passive character in the movie with no genuine willpower. She is always being pushed or primed by others, specifically, the men around her. The only power she is allowed to posses or exercise, surfaces at the end of the movie when she makes a decision to offer water to the railroad men. Even this show of willpower is not one Jill has decided for herself for it is the men who have ‘prepared’ her to take on the task she fulfills at the end, specifically, the task of a mother and a matriarch. However, a more positive look at Jill’s character reveals that she has willpower in the movie. In a quite radical sense, she in fact assumes the role of a Western protagonist usually exclusively assigned to men, thus breaking the long-established gender stereotypes embedded in Western tradition (Matheson 64): Of ultimate importance is not whether the hero is ideally masculine or ideally feminine but whether he is ideally successful. This success often demands that the Western hero negotiate between the poles of masculine and feminine performance to find the mean of behavior that will ultimately achieve that success… Although females in the Western are regularly dismissed, ridiculed, or reviled, it does not necessarily follow that effeminacy bears an irrevocable taint, for the assumption of feminine behavior by male heroes bespeaks strategy, not essence. The survival of Jill is rooted in her capability and determines her heroic role, not by being relegated to an image of a domesticated female but by espousing both feminine and masculine attributes. Jill, as a former sex worker, is familiar with the intricacies of the male territory (Matheson 64-65). The fact that she was able to dominate that territory without having to sell herself as a commodity to succeed demonstrates her remarkable capacity to perform both feminine and masculine roles. At this point it is essential to emphasize how gender-based interpretations of the Western look at the roles of women within a genre whose features and essence have erroneously been determined as masculine. Particular inconsistencies in the manner feminine role and male heroics have been viewed by scholars of the Western genre divulge the manner in which these perspectives give advantage to the male character. Traditional interpretations of the Western are focused on a male idol that facilitates the shift from wilderness to civilization and from isolation to assimilation (Frayling 138). The transition from wilderness to civilizations also defines how the roles of women in the West have been viewed by scholars. If one takes into account the frequently mentioned belief that men cultivate and women tame, then it should be recognized that while both roles lead to a similar result, only one of them can be considered praiseworthy. If a man deals with the wilderness and civilization in order to bring back unity, he is seen as a ‘hero’, but when a woman carries out the same task, she is seen as a de-masculinizing matriarch (Matheson 65). The extermination of ‘frontier individualists’ or forlorn male idols bring out a feeling of loss and hatred toward the woman who would control them. Although classified a radical Western, Leone’s film is a cinematic masterpiece that fits strongly into the Western tradition. Indeed, the movie does not express a deviation from the traditional nature of its genre so as to represent a filmmaker’s sadness over the disappearance of masculine and patriarchal values, but instead it exactly conforms to the principles of the genre (Fawell 82). The most revolutionary ideology it espouses concerns the manner it emancipates the female character within that long-established practice and reconstructs the sexist concept of ‘hero’. Jill exercises her willpower not by how she decides to act, but by what she decides to overlook or disregard. Jill’s choice to disregard actions that may otherwise provoke a response in a male character would appear simply to restore the stereotypical notion of female submissiveness that has characterized women’s roles in the traditional Western genre. For instance, Jill refuses to avenge her husband’s murder, and she does not have any desire to take the cash possibly concealed in Sweetwater. Even though she searches for it so as to shed light on the murders, she finally surrenders and tells Cheyenne that he can have the money if he is able to find it. Jill’s lack of interest in the money distances her from the covetous male characters. These decisions that she made for herself demonstrate her willpower and agency. She does not need a weapon to secure her survival; instead she herself represents her ultimate weapon (Cumbow 94). Her self-consciousness, intuition, and intelligence equip her with the perfect weapon against those who would try to tear her down. Conclusions Stagecoach and Once Upon a Time in the West have similarities and differences in terms of their representation of gender and masculinity. Both use a female protagonist to embody both masculine and feminine attributes. They do not rigidly delineate female and male roles; instead they merge them into one—Dallas, in Stagecoach, and Jill, in Once Upon a Time in the West. Both female protagonists are an embodiment of a strengthening transition from patriarchy to matriarchy. Dallas is endowed with maternal prowess whereas Jill is endowed with willpower and agency. However, the two movies differ in the way they represent their female characters. John Ford decides to adopt the character of a female pariah who proves her moral ascendancy despite being labeled as a degenerate, whereas Sergio Leone uses the character of a strong, empowered woman to demonstrate how the machismo ideal gradually disappeared. The two filmmakers differ in their purposes—Ford wants to show how women’s roles, as a mother or a wife, are admirable while Leone wants to express his nostalgia for masculine and patriarchal values. Works Cited Cook, Pam. Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema. London: Routledge, 2005. Print. Cumbow, Robert. The Films of Sergio Leone. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2008. Print. Fawell, John. The Art of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West: A Critical Appreciation. Michigan: McFarland, 2005. Print. Frayling, Christopher. Once upon in Italy: the westerns of Sergio Leone. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005. Print. Frayling, Christopher. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006. Print. Gallagher, Tag. John Ford: The Man and His Films. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1986. Print. Grant, Barry. John Ford’s Stagecoach. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print. Kozloff, Sarah. Overhearing Film Dialogue. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2000. Print. Matheson, Sue. Love in Western Film and Television: Lonely Hearts and Happy Trails. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print. Pearson, Sidney. Print the Legend: Politics, Culture, and Civic Virtue in the Films of John Ford. New York: Lexington Books, 2009. Print. Smith, Henry. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. New York: Harvard University Press, 1950. Print. Studlar, Gaylyn & Matthew Bernstein. John Ford Made Westerns: Filming the Legend in the Sound Era. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001. Print. Read More