7 Women (1965 ) There's nothing particularly odd or strange about this film......it's a well acted, well put together little drama.....featuring, as promised in its title, a cast of characters primarily made up of women.
But.....Holy Sprockets, get a load of who directed it.
Yes, you read the opening credits correctly......it's the final directing stint in the long, long legendary career of John Ford, whose movie-making began in the silent era......
Ford? Really? The icon who directed John Wayne in monumental westerns like 'Stagecoach' and 'The Searchers'? The famously rough, gruff, touch-as-nails director who often bullied and terrorized his actors....(including Wayne)?
This guy made this brief (87 minutes) but powerful melodrama about women hurled into terrible danger while running a missionary outpost in the middle 1935 China?
He sure as hell did. And though Ford's failing health forced him to shoot the film entirely inside studio stages, the results are every bit as muscular, melodramatic and compelling as any of his male-oriented classics like "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon", "Fort Apache" and "The Horse Soldiers".
The mission's run by Agatha Andrews (Margaret Leighton) a stern religious zealot whose only soft spot is the...uh, somewhat overbearing affection she shows the mission's youngest member, the innocent and sweet Emma (Sue Lyon, fresh from star-making role as Kubrick's 'Lolita')
Everyone else in the mission weathers Agatha's iron hand, including her simpering minion Jane (Mildred Dunnock) and Florrie Pether,(Betty Field) a near menopausal whining neurotic who's been unwisely impregnated at her age by her hapless, would-be pastor Charles (Eddie Albert).
The status quo soon gets shaken up to the max with the arrival of Dr. D. R. Cartwright (Anne Bancroft), a free-thinking, chain smoking, no nonsense medico who outrages Agatha with her disdain of religion and I-don't-give-a-shit-what-you-think-of-me behavior. On the run from the advancing warlords, two British women Miss Binns and Mrs. Russell (Flora Robson and Anna Lee) join the group, warning of the imminent arrival of a rampaging warlord.
The film, much like the director's celebrated cavalry vs. Indians trilogy, wastes little time in plunging this disparate group of women into a perilous inescapable situation. Their remotely situated missionary school is overrun by the brutal warlord Tunga Khan (Mike Mazurki) and Khan's even more frightening and formidable second-in-command...(longtime Ford favorite, the towering Woody Strode)
Facing certain rape and murder, the women find a brave savior in Dr. Cartwright, who in selfless sacrifice, offers herself up to Tunga Khan as a sex slave in exchange for letting the rest of them go free.
Maybe this modest little female-driven movie seems an odd farewell for the larger-than-life Ford, the orchestrator of wide open Monument Valley spectacles, but he still puts his stamp of professionalism and storytelling expertise all over it. (And that climactic scene between the hard-edged Bancroft and the hulking Mazurki is pure, punch-in-the-gut Ford)
Powered with an immediately robust Elmer Bernstein score and that superb cast of actresses, '7 Woman' still holds up as a film well worth checking out. Ford, as tough on himself as anybody, was satisfied and happy with how it turned out.
So is the BQ. 4 stars (****).
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