A Long Trail to Continue: Women in the Western
The review is published on Film Internatonal website. Director Anthony Mann famously said “…without a woman the Western wouldn’t work.” But how have themes of femininity on the frontier in women-led Westerns changed from silent to the streaming age of cinema? In Sue Matheson’s book Women in the Western, published by University of Edinburgh, the idea of the essential nature of the female presence in America’s frontier mythology is explored in eighteen contributing essays divided into two main chapters, those regarding the traditional period of the genre, from silents to the 1940s, on to post-Second World War years, and also the revisionist and post-modern Western. Historian David Blanke’s essay “When East Goes West: The Loss of Dramatic Agency in DeMille’s Western women from the 1910s to the 1930s” deals with the director’s establishment within the genre. From 1914 until 1917, DeMille made seven Western features and advanced from stage to film directing. Blanke establishes the w...