"Bad Girls"
                             A film review by
                           Linda Lopez McAlister
                           on "The Women's Show"
                         WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                              April 23, 1994

    Here we go again. "Bad Girls" is another film that all the male critics I
have read absolutely hate and the women I know who have seen it like quite a
lot. Our local newspaper guy gave it a "D-" in his report-card-like rating
scale, and Roger Ebert bestowed a stingy one and a half stars on it. The
ironic thing about this is that you'd think it would be just the opposite--
that the women would hate and the men like this film--which is, after all,
just an old-fashioned shoot-em-up Western--along with war pictures, one of the
quintessentially he-man genres of Hollywood film.

     Don't get me wrong, I won't go to the mat claiming that this is great
cinematic art. It's the same old, good-guy/bad-guy morality tale
plot structure you've seen in Westerns forever, with not much in the way
of character development or subtlty, and with a great deal of riding and
shooting and other kinds of violent clashes.

   What's different about it, of course, is that the "good guys" are the "bad
girls" of the title played by Madeline Stowe, Mary Stuart Masterson, Andie
MacDowell, and Drew Barrymore, who, as the film begins are all working as
prostitutes in a saloon in Texas in the 1890s. The first shot establishes this
as a film with some feminist consciousness as Anita (Masterson), one of the
whores, sits in her room reading a newspaper story about the exploits of
Nellie Bly, the famous woman reporter who travelled around the world in 72
days. When her John arrives and starts roughing her up on the balcony
overlooking the saloon, Cody Zamora (Stowe), whose "parlour house" this seems
to be, shoots the man dead. As a band of self-righteous, Bible-thumping,
reformers lead Cody off to be summarily lynched, as much for being an "evil
Jezebel" with a "scorpion between her legs" as for shooting the man, the other
three women have appropriated some horses and a wagon and come barrelling
along the main street into the crowd and rescue their friend. Thus
the action begins as the four hunted women try to recover some money Cody has
been socking away in a bank in her hometown of Aguas Dulces and they encounter
both helpful and decidedly unhelpful men along the way toward their goal of
self-sufficiency through opening a sawmill in the Oregon Territory.

   Lots of Westerns have prostitutes in them, but few ever let you know who
these women are or show any consciousness of why they are earning their living
in that way, thereby leaving untouched the cultural assumption that they are
just bad women. This film sketches the background circumstances that led each
of these four women to make her living as a prostitute and highlights the
paucity of opportunities there were for a woman to survive in the West when
circumstances left her a "loose woman" i.e., a woman not connected to a
husband, father, or other male relative; a widow couldn't even inherit a
homestead claim that she and her late husband had owned in common. This is the
fate that, in all liklihood, would have befallen Little Jo in "The Ballad of
Little Jo" if she hadn't been able successfully to pass as a man or had been
found out. (That wonderful feminist Western is now out on video, by the way).
"Bad Girls" also depicts the love that these four women have for one another,
and that they're not afraid to express with kisses and embraces. Another nice
touch is that when you look around the inhabitants of Echo City and Aguas
Dulces you see a variety of races and kinds of people represented, not just
the usual white males who inhabit most Hollywood Western worlds.

   I have to wonder what it is, exactly, that's really eating the male critics
about this film. They seem to have to stretch hard to find things actually to
complain about, for example Roger Ebert carries on about how it is that these
women who spend all their time in a brothel know how to ride--despite the fact
that the film makes it perfectly clear from their previous backgrounds that
each of them would have known how to ride). Mostly the guys complain that this
is no better than a male Western (why must it be?), and that if you imagine
men in these same situations you'd see how bad a film it is. That criticism,
of course, absurdly misses the point of the film. You could not put men into
these situations because it is precisely gender differences that get these
women into the situation they're in in the first place. No, I think what's
really eating the male critics is an unacknowledged resentment that even the
male bastion of the Hollywood Western has here been usurped by women; they do
it as well as the men do, though with a difference, namely including some
degree of feminist consciousness along the way.

Copyright 1994 by Linda Lopez McAlister.  All rights reserved.  Please do not
reprint this review without permission.