by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

Male protagonists certainly dominate the western as a genre, but there’s at least a good movie with a woman in the lead role once a decade. From Destry Rides Again, to Johnny Guitar, to The Quick and the Dead, many of these happen to take a comedic tone on as well, making these “girl westerns” their own sort of subgenre. In this column, I’ll be looking at Cat Ballou (1962) and Hannie Caulder (1971) to look at how the genre changed in this decade, and what they have to say about women with guns (who aren’t Annie Oakley). 

Cat Ballou comes at an interesting time for the genre. Released a few years after How the West Was Won, a movie that tried to David Lean the western, this is basically the fallow period between the more classical westerns and when the spaghetti revival, started by A Fistful of Dollars, starts to pick up steam and influence Hollywood. Cat Ballou, Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country, and the handful of Wayne westerns between Liberty Valance (1962) and True Grit (1969) are in a kind of wilderness. The western was most popular on television, with Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and Maverick all airing in this period. So a western movie might have to work a little harder to get attention at the cinema. And Cat Ballou arrives with a breakout star in Jane Fonda, a lighthearted tone, and Nat King Cole. 

There are a few things that made Cat Ballou such a great comedy. One of them is the sheer number of jokes, which mix wordplay and irony with slapstick and other broad humor, and the whole film is carried by such a light tone and energetic spirit. Adding to the tone are the Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye as a Greek chorus of two, singing folk style tunes to move the plot along and push against the fourth wall as they do it. This gives Cat Ballou an easygoing feeling, and it oscillates between parody and being a straight comedy-western. Even the story’s darker elements are treated this way, which also echoes a long story-song, a comedic ballad of the girl known as Cat Ballou (you can definitely hear the title in the voices of Cole and Kaye if you’ve seen the movie before). 

Jane Fonda is effervescent from the moment she appears on screen, and the film winks at her sexiness with the playful enthusiasm of someone who doesn’t understand how they attracted someone so hot in the first place. Lee Marvin may have won the (well deserved) Oscar for his dual role here, but this is firmly Fonda’s movie. Although Fonda wasn’t a feminist icon yet, and the story is definitely framed from a man’s perspective, there’s still a lot of self-determination for Cat. Yes, this is a comedy, but none of it takes away from Cat’s drive or her leadership about her mission. Her revenge may be futile, but the movie suggests this is only the beginning of her outlaw career. 

Hannie Caulder is a weird movie. Made by Tigon British Film Productions, most known for their Hammer-esque horror pictures like Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, and The Creeping Flesh, it maybe should be no surprise that Hannie Caulder also feels like an exploitation flick. A large part of that feel comes from this being a rape-revenge movie. In the opening sequence, Hannie (Raquel Welch), a homestead wife in an especially rural part of the West, is gangraped by members of the Clemens gang, after they murder her husband. When they are finished with Hannie, they burn the house and leave her for dead. 

Hannie recruits a bounty hunter (Robert Culp) to help her train as a gunfighter so that she can exact her revenge. What follows operates like a martial arts film with a western overlay. The two head to Mexico where Hannie learns how to quick draw and train herself as a gunfighter. While there, a gunsmith–played by Christopher Lee in a delightful cameo appearance, he seriously elevates any movie where he shows up–makes her a special revolver to help her complete her quest. Eventually, Hannie and the bounty hunter head back to face off against the Clemens gang. Hannie meets Emmett Clemens (Ernest Borgnine) face to face and kills him, completing her revenge. But at what cost?

In her excellent book Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol J. Clover argues that “it is no coincidence that the emergence of rape as a full-fledged cinematic subject is simultaneous with its being yoked to a retaliation plot and coded as an action film.” Hannie Caulder is an interesting case study, coming out the same year as Straw Dogs and a year before Last House on the Left, two films instrumental in building the rape-revenge structure in horror films. Caulder director Burt Kennedy shows us more of the rape than would have been shown even a few years earlier, but this is undercut with moments of the rapists comedically exiting the house once by one. By showing them as buffoons, it allows (men in) the audience to distance themselves even further from the assault being depicted. While Emmett turns out to be a formidable threat later on, the general depiction of the gang also makes Hannie’s skills seem less impressive than they might have otherwise. While I appreciate what the movie is trying to do, the tone is so inconsistent that it makes much of it feel underbaked.

Writing up these two movies, and thinking back to The Belle Starr Story, has been a good reminder that putting a gun in the hand of a woman does not make a western automatically “feminist.” Especially when compared to something like Meek’s Cutoff or The Wind from 2018. Both Cat Ballou and Hannie Caulder are movies I enjoy, and they feature fun performances from Jane Fonda and Raquel Welch. They are revisionist fantasies which reflect the times in which they were made, but they don’t push gender dynamics the way Belle Starr or Johnny Guitar (one of the most queer classic westerns) do.