'Westward The Women' (1951)

In 'Westward The Women', wagon master Buck Wyatt (Robert Taylor) is tasked with the challenge of bringing 138 women west to California. In Chicago, Illinois he recruits the women. They then set off to Independence, Missouri to gather together a small group of volunteers. The California trail proves treacherous and many lives are lost but Buck remains steadfast in his duty to bring the wagon train home.

The arid, dusty western epic 'Westward The Women' opens in California in 1851. A community of men are prepared to pay Buck Wyatt to corral around 150 women and keep them under tight control, then herd them like wild horses cross-country, reigning them in whenever one of them strays. But Buck has other ideas. Buck wants women who can negotiate hard times and challenge the land. The trip will be a tough 2000 miles so it's essential.

"I'm very happily pursuing William Wellman movies whenever they turn up, as easily 4/5th of them turn out to be extremely entertaining, always with some element that goes against expectations for a genre, or a subject. 1951's 'Westward the Women' comes late in a series of MGM movie assignments, mostly winners for Wellman: 'Across the Wide Missouri', 'The Next Voice You Hear'..., 'Battleground'. Personally produced by Dore Schary, it's about a wagon train, a subject one would think had pretty much been tapped out. Yet 'Westward the Women' is one of those pictures that makes us think, well, this is how it might have been. An unexpected plus is the film's feminist angle. With very little in the way of fussing and no cheap jokes about female weakness, the script by Charles Schnee (from a story by Frank Capra, no less) gives us 138 women who prove completely capable of taking care of themselves."

- Glenn Erickson, DVD Savant

"An unvarnished look at the hard road that a group of women settlers have to face on a wagon train journey to California. Nothing is glamorized and the cost of the trip is honestly depicted as heavy with human lives. As with real life even in tough times there are humorous incidents that happen and they enrich the story and the film. A unique film with excellent direction. Hope Emerson stands out as a no nonsense, plain spoken traveler but all the performances are very good."

- Jay Nixon, Rotten Tomatoes

'Westward The Women' is a beautifully observed character piece that relies upon broad ensemble acting, detailed reactions and painstaking construction. Director William Wellman explores wide, expansive landscapes at a time when he was embellishing his visual palette with big pictures like 'Across The Wide Missouri' (1951) and 'Track Of The Cat' (1954). Cinematographer William Mellor adds warmth, vigour, vitality and shading to Wellman's typically demanding camera set-ups which capture imaginative choreography and intricate crowd set-pieces that are said to have influenced large-scale outdoor pictures directed by Miklos Jancso, Michael Cimino, Edward Zwick and Renny Harlin.

One by one, people fail, fall or depart the trail, and with numbers dwindling, panic sets in as desperation grows in inhospitable conditions. A depressing role call of the dead and dying, deep within an echo valley following a land attack, becomes a rallying cry from a group of strong women with absolutely no quit in them. There are some extraordinary set-pieces at play here; a perilous wagon mountain descent must surely rank with the lowering of the wagons in Raoul Walsh's 'The Big Trail' (1930) as one of the most incredible western survival set-pieces of its nature.

 "There’s quite a lot of untranslated Italian and French from the women concerned. I speak both and I can tell you that the Hays Office evidently didn’t because they say things that would never have got by the office in English. William Mellor photographed the movie in luminous black & white in Kanab, Utah and Death Valley, California locations in the summer of ‘51, and there are some stunning shots. He did not aim for the picturesque, as such, in the way that, say, John Ford and his cameramen did, but for scenery that highlighted the aridity and harshness of the terrain traversed. It is said that the two hundred women engaged for eleven weeks to make the movie had almost as hard a time of it on location as the people they were playing would have had going west. MGM produced a short, Challenge the Wilderness, about the making of the film."

- Jeff Arnold, Jeff Arnold's West

"A Westerner at heart and a fine horseman, Robert Taylor never became a Westerns icon, but like Glenn Ford, he fit the genre naturally. He stood before the camera with grit and honesty, his deep voice and worn handsomeness projecting a simple truth about his characters, proving that the “Male Garbo” was indeed made of tough stuff."

- C. Courtney Joyner, True West : History Of The American Frontier

William Wellman includes a homage to Giuseppe De Santis' 'Bitter Rice' (1949) and references Frank Capra's 'The Bitter Tea Of General Yen' (1932). The original story behind 'Westward The Women' is by Capra who had planned to film it in the 1930s, perhaps with Gary Cooper as the wagon master and Claudette Colbert in the role of French explorer Fifi Danon who's so brilliantly played by Denise Darcel. The large ensemble cast includes Julie Bishop as scarred traveller Laurie Smith, Marilyn Erskine as mule handler Jean Johnson, Beverly Dennis as schoolteacher Rose Meyers, Lenore Lonergan as horse wrangler Maggie O'Malley, Renata Vanni as cherished immigrant Mrs. Maroni, Pat Conway as valued wagon tracer Sid Cutler and Hope Emerson in outstanding form as den mother Patience Hawley of New Bedford, Massachusetts.