**This paper was completed for a Southwest Film Studies course at Texas State University in the Fall semester of 2015. Course description and contact information available at request.**

Both John Ford’s Stagecoach and Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon depict women in belle versus whore genre roles; yet use them in different ways to manipulate the narrative of the films. Unlike those two films, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown combines the two genre roles into another one, the femme fatale, and uses it to enhance its point of view structure of the narrative. Stagecoach uses this dichotomy to alienate the women both visually and narratively, and in doing so reinforces a traditional social hierarchy. High Noon equalizes both types of women to assert them over both a traditional patriarchal ideology and the film’s narrative. Lastly, Chinatown uses another archetype, the femme fatale, which is a combination of both the belle and the whore roles. In loosely using the Femme Fatale role Chinatown depicts the evolution women and how they are defined by their social status in the 1930s. All three films, whether directly or indirectly, classify women within a social status and use them in order to challenge cultural ideologies set by the films and society.

In John Ford’s film, Stagecoach, the two female passengers in the stagecoach are Dallas and Lucy Mallory. They are two of the main characters within the film and serve as foils for each other. Dallas represents a whore in the western, while Lucy Mallory is a belle or rather a woman of higher class. The film depicts Dallas as a whore, and an example of her character is found in how she is shot with the law and order league. She is separated from the group not only narratively as the whore that society has exiled, but also by being in separate shots from the league even though they stand feet away. In not being shot with the law and order league the viewer does not include Dallas amongst one of the group, but rather she is excluded from them. Throughout the scene the camera cuts between the law and order league and then reverses to point of view shots of Dallas from their perspective. It adds to the scene since they judge her because of her class, and by alienating her with point of view shots the viewer infers that Dallas is not accepted in their polite society. While Dallas is alienated from society in her shots, Lucy in integrated from her first appearance on screen. When Lucy is first introduced women of equal social standings surround her, while she is placed in the center of the shot. Lucy is a well-respected woman married to a military man and is treated as such throughout the narrative. She is higher up in society than Dallas and it accepts her, and it even goes so far as to protect her due to her pregnancy. However, Dallas eventually gains the respect of Lucy after she helps care for her infant child. André Bazin refers to this narrative shift as “the whore with the heart of gold” who through her actions “ redeems her in the eyes of spectators” (144). Thus, Lucy gives her respect in the last scene she is in within the movie, stating:

LUCY. If there is anything I could ever do for… (She falters and looks away)

DALLAS. I know.

Bazin goes on to suggest that all women from western films are “vestals of social virtues” regardless of their social status, due to women being so scarce in “primitive Western” society (Bazin 145). In this way the two characters show how social classes potentially interacted in traditional Western society during that time period, but also reflect the importance of women overall in that society.

Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon takes place in a small town in the southwest where a criminal is seeking revenge on their sheriff, Will Kane, and he must stand against the criminal alone. A dichotomy of the whore and the belle presents itself within High Noon in the two main female characters, Amy Kane and Helen Ramirez. Amy as the newly married Mrs. Kane is a proper gentle lady. Several shots in the beginning of the film have her in the same frame as her husband, such as when they are leaving town on the carriage after they catch news of the outlaws coming into town. In that shot she is at the same height as him and by his side, making her his equal in terms of visuals. Amy is grouped with Will, a symbol of the law, at an equal standing visually, and as his wife she is also his equal in matrimony. She is also Will’s equal in that he does not bar her choices within the film’s narrative, unlike Lucy in Stagecoach whose actions are dictated by her search for her husband. When Amy faces the fact that Will must stay to defend the town, she challenges him:

AMY. No! You’re asking me to wait an hour to find out if I’m going to be a wife or a widow, and I say it’s too long to wait!

WILL. (Stunned) Amy…

AMY. I know—You think I’m just saying it—because I’m angry. But I mean it! If you won’t go with me now—I’ll be on that train when it leaves here…

Helen Ramirez also possesses a similar autonomy separate from the men in the film. Don Graham notes how Helen “achieves a revenge […] by gaining economic advantages against a society bent on using or scorning her” by purchasing the largest store in town (246, emphasis added). She is alone in plenty of reverse shot angles, such as when she sells her business to the general store owner who is nervous to be buying it from a woman of her status. In framing Helen like this she is seen by the viewer as an independent woman, they can also infer that she is separated from polite society by how people treat her and in how she is usually alone in shots. Yet before the climax of the film when Amy and Helen ride off to the train to skip town both of them are in the shot and at an equal level, similar to the shot with Amy and Will in the carriage at the beginning of the film. However, unlike the shot with Amy and Will, the shot with Helen and Amy has a point of view shot from William’s perspective. The low angle of the camera has Kane looking up towards the women, thus pinning him beneath them. Don Graham states that both women “transcend the limitations of their genre roles” by interacting with each other as social equals (247). They are both elevated above the narrative and the traditional ideology of a male dominated society even though the western film’s idea of their genre roles would pit them against each other.

All three films categorize women into different social spheres, even if it might be contradicting in the case of Chinatown’s femme fatale. While Dallas and Lucy from Stagecoach abide to the genre roles they fill, they go against the set social hierarchy. The same can be said of Helen and Amy in High Noon, except that they subvert the social narrative from the start, such as Helen owning the largest business in town when the events of High Noon begin. Evelyn Mulwray of Chinatown rejects the genre role set upon her by Jake Gittes through her actions in the narrative, but suffers due to Jake’s actions over the course of the film. Each one of these films questions society’s perceptions of women across the ages by using the very stereotypes used to describe them. In turn these stereotypes are complicated by the characters portraying them to become more than just generalizations, but instead are mere building blocks for more diverse characterizations of women.

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Bazin, André. “The Western: Or the American Film Par Excellence.” What Is Cinema? Vol. II. Los Angeles: U of California, 1971. 140-149. Print.

Chinatown. Dir. Roman Polanski. Prod. Robert Evans. By Robert Towne. Perf. Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and John Huston. Paramount, 1974. Streaming.

Graham, Don. “The Women of “high Noon”: A Revisionist View”. Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 34.4 (1980): 243–251. Web. 6 Dec. 2015.

Grossman, Julie. “Film Noir’s “Femme Fatales” Hard-Boiled Women: Moving Beyond Gender Fantasies.” Quarterly Review Of Film & Video 24.1 (2007): 19-30. Academic Search Complete. Web. 6 Dec. 2015.

High Noon. Dir. Fred Zinnemann. Perf. Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly. United Artists, 1952.

Stagecoach. Dir. John Ford. Perf. John Wayne, Claire Trevor. United Artists, 1939.