User Reviews

I am not quite sure why anyone should have difficulty understanding this film unless it is because of the intertitles which are poor and rather misleading. It is I suspect an abbreviated version so we do not quite get the introduction to the various characters that we clearly ought to have but but the story is clear and simple enough and it is a really rather impressive little film just simply for the uncommonly harsh and realistic view of the west that it portrays. In any frontier situation, the battle over who gets who as a marriage partner is a very real thing and here not only is the the violence of the two women competing for the man very impressively conveyed, but so is the violence of the world around them.

The central characters are two very tough women - Bess who runs a bar (played by Handworth) - we see her chucking out a difficult customer at the beginning of the film - and has had, according to her rival, "three husbands, and killed two of them" and the anti-herione, the doughty Molly McCall (played by Brice). It is Molly (Brice) who is jilted and who attacks Bess on the day before the wedding. At which point all the women gang up against her and ride her out of town on the rail while Bess makes a point of spitting on her as she goes while the men also take the opportunity to mock her..

This is splendid stuff. There are no ladies here. Molly is taken in by a trapper and his Indian wife (no nonsense here about segregation) and she returns to the town dressed as an Indian just as the couple are being seen off. Afterwards a series of accidents kill off those who have cheated, mocked and humiliated her and on each occasion she is there to gloat (no nonsense about forgiveness - she even stops the rattlesnake victim from taking an anecdote and takes quite an active part in driving the drunk over a cliff).

The faithless Thurston Hall and Bess meanwhile have been producing babies and this results in an abrupt but predictably rather feeble ending (where is Von Stroheim when one needs him) but, up to that moment, it is a gripping revisionist western.