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Westward the Women (William A. Wellman, 1951)
This is a powerful, entertaining depiction of a wagon train from Missouri to California which is transporting over a hundred women from Chicago to California in 1851. Roy Whitman (John McIntire) has established a community of male farmers in a California valley, but the men need wives to be happy and make the community grow. Whitman hires trail boss Buck Wyatt (Robert Taylor), and together they go to Chicago to recruit "good women" who are up to the difficult journey and want to get married. After selecting 138 women, they take a riverboat down the Mississippi and organize their wagon train to head west.
Although it's not without humor, the trek is fraught with tragedy as many people are killed along the way, and eventually all that are left are Buck, his Japanese sidekick (Henry Nakamura) and the women survivors. The great strength of the film is that all the characters seem realistic and that the trip does take the time to show all the pain and suffering involved in such an undertaking, but hard work and perseverance do win out in the end. There are so many female sctors and characters who stand out that I can't mention them all, but Hope Emerson shines as the heart and soul of the group, Julie Bishop does well as a young pregnant woman who gives birth on the trail, and Denise Darcel adds some sexual tension in her love/hate relationship with Robert Taylor. This is one film which gets to its ending and deserves all the smiles and tears it illicits in the viewer.
This is a powerful, entertaining depiction of a wagon train from Missouri to California which is transporting over a hundred women from Chicago to California in 1851. Roy Whitman (John McIntire) has established a community of male farmers in a California valley, but the men need wives to be happy and make the community grow. Whitman hires trail boss Buck Wyatt (Robert Taylor), and together they go to Chicago to recruit "good women" who are up to the difficult journey and want to get married. After selecting 138 women, they take a riverboat down the Mississippi and organize their wagon train to head west.
Although it's not without humor, the trek is fraught with tragedy as many people are killed along the way, and eventually all that are left are Buck, his Japanese sidekick (Henry Nakamura) and the women survivors. The great strength of the film is that all the characters seem realistic and that the trip does take the time to show all the pain and suffering involved in such an undertaking, but hard work and perseverance do win out in the end. There are so many female sctors and characters who stand out that I can't mention them all, but Hope Emerson shines as the heart and soul of the group, Julie Bishop does well as a young pregnant woman who gives birth on the trail, and Denise Darcel adds some sexual tension in her love/hate relationship with Robert Taylor. This is one film which gets to its ending and deserves all the smiles and tears it illicits in the viewer.