No “bundling” – that’s the law as laid down by Buck Wyatt (Robert Taylor). Female-centric western Westward the Women is not only a clear influence on Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff but a great demonstration of the talents of director William Wellman, who’d been doing westerns for 30 years by the time he got round to shooting this 1951 movie, so knew exactly what it was all about.
The story is about a convoy of women making the arduous journey out West, where there’s a chronic shortage of men. Sign up and choose your husband is the big idea – it’s the women who do the choosing, picking out the man they fancy from a big array of photographs laid out at a meeting organised by Roy Whitman (John McIntire), the big noise out West who’s hired seasoned trailsman Buck to lead 150 or so women in a long line of wagons through some of the country’s nastiest terrain.
They are a mixed bunch of ladies. Among them Fifi Danon (Denise Darcel) and Laurie Smith (Julie Bishop), a pair of goodtime girls. Widowed Mrs Moroni (Renata Vanni) and her son Tony (Guido Martufi), neither of whom can speak English. Rose (Beverly Dennis), a slip of a girl who turns out to be in the family way. And Patience Hawley (Hope Emerson), a hatchet-faced woman too old to bear children who’s heading out West because she’s not too old to want a husband. Representative, temperamentally at least.
“Bundling” means sex and it’s the big taboo. All those single women, with only a handful of men along for protection. All those bloomers being washed and hung out to dry as the wagon train heads West. It’s enough to turn a dusty old trail hand’s head. And so it proves.
Not Buck though. He’s the carousing sort of man with no interest in finding a good woman or in settling down. For noble Buck women are trouble, the way they often are in John Wayne movies. “There’s two things in this world that scare me, and a good woman is both,” he says at one point. Taylor imitates Wayne vocally most of the time, so it’s a connection he’s clearly made, possibly without realising.
It’s a trial by… movie. Trial by heat, starvation, thirst, Native American, marauding trail hands. By snake, by unexpected childbirth. By flood. By stampeding horses. By love?
Wellman keeps it coming and thanks to those strongly painted key characters established early on, it only occasionally feels like a “one damn thing after another” movie. Which is what it is.
The throughline is Buck’s increasing respect for the “ladies”, who he can barely be bothered to speak to directly at first. But their pluck and heroic sacrifice – plenty die – force him to change his view.
Taylor is fine but hardly electric. Best thing in it really is Denise Darcel as Fifi. An actress who should have had more of a career but got stuck with a professional Frenchie tag, Darcel makes a good Fifi, tough, sexy, wilful and irresistible, surely, to a hard-bitten old cuss like Buck.
It was originally going to be a Frank Capra movie. He came up with the story and it has his trademarks, a range of emotions visited in turn – romance, pity, joy, fortitude etc. But it’s clearly a Wellman movie. He was a director in the silent era and you can tell. His opening shot, of women staring heroically out West, would be socialist realism pure and simple if this were a movie from the Soviet Union. He also knows how to shoot people on horseback better than almost anyone.
This is the well made movie – skilful technically, well structured, with good pace, points of historical interest, a periodic sprinkling of comedy to offset the periodic jeopardy. And it looks good too, thanks cinematographer William Mellor (who did Bad Day at Black Rock), and to the studio’s agreement to Wellman’s request to shoot it all (the odd interior excepted) on locations in Arizona, Utah and the Mojave Desert.
An under-appreciated gem.
Westward the Women – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
