.. ut voicing her aversion for it. She unlike the character in Shane is not a flat character. Her emotions and sympathetic behavior is actually felt and understood by the viewer. The other two female parts in this movie are very minor yet very opposite.
An old girlfriend of Books comes into town after hearing the bad news about him. She seems sympathetic towards him at first and he mistakes her moral support. She wanted to marry him to carry his name into a book deal about Bookss life that would written by the famous Mrs. Books. This offended Books and he threw her out. He did not want to be remembered by a fiction story in a book.
As the woman is leaving she wishes a horrid and painful death to Mr. Books. She is a nasty greedy character who makes the viewers even more sympathetic to the dying gunman. The last female character is on the train when Book boards. She is smiling and announces what a beautiful day it is outside.
She is young and pretty and full of pure innocence. She enlightens Books and he smiles for the first time in the movie. It is his birthday as well as the day he dies. The girl brings a sense of completion into Books life.
Even though it has been full of killing and cruelty she brings morality that Books can truly appreciates. In the third 1994 movie, Quick and the Dead, the female role is completely different from the first two movies. Sharon Stone plays a leading woman role that is much like a typical male hero in a western movie. The hero rides into town, saves the day, and then rides off into the sunset just as mysteriously as he came in. Although Stone is similar to a male in a western, the woman has a more developed character. By the end of the movie we know of her past and more background than we would typically know about a male character.
As the male dressed woman rides into town she acts very masculine. She smokes a cigar as she walks into the saloon. She orders a drink and sits down. She is rude to anyone that tries to talk to her including the young girl who says shes never seen a woman with a gun before. Men still look at her as a sex object and dont really take her toughness seriously.
She comes back at them with a smart remark and a careless attitude. Stones character acquires the name The Lady while in the first bar scene and that what she is known by throughout the film. Her past is told by flashbacks of her fathers death. As a little girl, it was up to her to save he fathers life but in result she was cause of his death.
This was of course a traumatizing ordeal that had affected her life. Perhaps that is why she comes across to others in the town at first as a tough, masculine type character. This is where we see more depth into The Lady. She has such strong guilt and love for her father and such hatred towards the town mayor who she realizes is the one that handed her the gun that day.
She defends the good in the town and looks after the other women. This is shown when Lady kills a man for having sex with a young girl. She then feels bad for killing another human being. Her emotions are very prevalent to the viewer causing sympathy towards the character. This is what sets her aside from a typical male in a western.
Ironically enough The Lady saves a preacher in the same situation that she had killed her father, which results, into her participation of the towns shooting contest. Her aim and gun skills had obviously improved and the viewers are left unsure what has happened in her life since she was a little girl. She gets upset at the fact that the preacher used to be an outlaw despite the fact that he has changed his ways. She dislikes those who kill and doesnt want to be a part of the shooting contest. Stones character has one very feminine moment in this film. She is invited to dinner from her enemy.
She uses her femininity as a weapon and shows up to dinner in a beautiful dress. This again gives more depth into her character. It brings out the true sensitive woman inside of her that she likes to keep hidden behind a very tough front. During the shooting scenes, the Lady is scared. She is nervous and does not want to be put in this situation.
Lady honestly doesnt want to hurt anyone innocent. Her hatred makes her determined to see the mayor dead in the end. She uses quick thinking and ultimately gets him back in the end. She then of course is the hero of the town and then rides off alone, perhaps a more healed person. Lady had resolved issues that had been stirring deep inside of her for so many years.
Although not present in any of these films, saloon girls are often part of western movies. These prostitutes are looked at only as sex objects by male characters. This type of representation is demeaning and unrealistic for women. Much like the loving mother, prostitutes are flat characters with no known background. This again gives a one sided, stereotypical view of the woman. In these three movies, women are depicted very differently.
Even though the films were created years apart, there is one thing that they all have in common. Women are important support characters in western movies. They bring in a different flavor into the film no matter what type of character they are represented as. Women should not be overlooked as minor background characters because if females were not present, the western would not be complete. Bibliography none Theater Essays.
