Bullwhip

There's not much to commend this Western apart from Rhonda Fleming looking good in an Indian princess outfit straight out of a musical. The plot is full of holes, such as Parnell's men knowing exactly where to find Steve and his sidekick and Pine Camp switching his loyalty from Cheyenne to Steve after being thrashed by him.

Pine Camp is an unconvincing Indian, just as Fleming makes an unconvincing half-breed.

When Cheyenne's wagons meet the Indians in an exchange of hand gestures I couldn't help feeling that Cheyenne should have been looking at them to the right, rather than to the left. I played back this sequence several times and the "wrong way round" effect persisted.

James Griffith was a bit of a disappointment - he spent all the time looking enigmatically po-faced, though at least he kept us wondering about which contract he was going to fulfil.

The bullwhip of the title wasn't much in evidence - just when Rhonda was flicking it in a fit of petulance and when she used it ineffectually on Steve.

The film could have been beefed up a bit by more tension between Steve and Cheyenne, especially if they had been played by not-so-nice actors; imagine Jack Palance and Barbara Stanwyck in the lead roles.

This is a well-worn story about a man who marries to escape the hangman's noose, then sets about "taming" his reluctant bride. It manages to be sexist and racist at exactly the same time. We never find out, for example, why a woman who won the respect of an Indian warrior is completely unable to fight back against her erstwhile husband. Or why the members of her team are so eager to get a "real man" in the saddle when she seems to have been taking care of things just fine on her own. This only made sense in fifties Hollywood.

There's a really stupid scene where she horsewhips him and he actually catches the whip--the second time--then yanks her off her horse. Never mind that the first time probably would have lost him an eye, which would make it pretty hard to grab that whip! Then, he prevails in a fight against her Indian bodyguard where he spends the first two thirds of it getting beaten to a pulp. That's some second wind. Later, he successfully negotiates with some bloodthirsty Indians (as they all are in these flicks) after they reject her now she's his "squaw". Never mind that he has zero diplomatic skills and she's been negotiating with them for years. And the way he keeps rejecting her attempts to seduce him just to keep her keen and keep her from getting a hold on him--yeah, right. Like the women are just throwing themselves at him all the way down the trail.

Finally, neither of the leads is convincing in their roles. Madison is just a jerk who gets unrealistically lucky. Fleming flips her hair and scowls a lot, but is totally unconvincing as a fiery tomboy. The only reason you'd root for her is because you want to see Madison get tied to a runaway horse and dragged over a cliff before the film's end. The way that Madison tames Fleming is so predictable and has so few obstacles that it will irritate the heck out of you if you see women as anything but blow-up dolls. Even if you do see them as dolls, the total lack of suspense will bore you.

Total waste of time. Even the scenery's kinda dull. Give this one a big miss.

"Bullwhip" is a romantic comedy with a Western setting. The hero, Steve Dailey, is in jail waiting to be hanged on a charge of murder- he says it was self-defence- when he is offered his freedom on condition he marries an unknown young woman. According to the Judge she needs a husband in order to fulfil and condition of her late father's will, which stipulated that she could only inherit his estate if married.

Unsurprisingly, Dailey accepts this offer, setting in motion a plot particularly convoluted even by the standards of rom-coms. The unknown woman turns out to be Cheyenne O'Malley, the half-Indian daughter of an Irish fur-trader and heiress to a considerable fortune. Cheyenne is a tough, independent woman- the film's title derives from the whip she always carries- and she and Dailey take an immediate dislike to one another, thus setting up the standard rom-com cliché that true love always follows hatred at first sight. In another complication, Dailey is being trailed by a hired gunman who has been hired not only to kill him (by the Judge, who wants his part in the murky affair hushed up) but also to keep him alive (by another fur trader who is hoping to go into partnership with Dailey once he has taken over his wife's business).

The film contains echoes of Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew", with Dailey as Petruchio and Cheyenne as Katharina. The Western was, generally, a male-dominated genre; I can think of plenty of well-known examples without a single significant female character, and plenty more where the female characters are only there to provide the hero's love-interest or to be protected by the hero against the villains. There were, of course, Westerns with a strong female lead- Joan Crawford in "Johnny Guitar" is a good example- but these tended to be the exception rather than the rule.

Even films which did have a leading female figure could end by reasserting traditional gender roles; the hard-bitten heroine of "Calamity Jane", for example, ends up by swapping her buckskins for a frilly dress and settling down to married life, an ending for which we have already been subconsciously prepared by the casting of Doris Day, an actress better known for romantic comedy as an action-adventure heroine. "Bullwhip" tells a similar story, the transformation of its heroine from a proud, independent woman to a submissive, domesticated wife, as Cheyenne learns to accept her husband's authority. She tries to use her bullwhip on him, but soon wishes she hadn't.

There will doubtless be many today who would regard the attitudes revealed by films like this as offensive, but they were fairly commonplace in the cinema of the fifties, and not only in Westerns. Even when judged by the standards of the fifties, however, "Bullwhip" does not work particularly well as a film. A romantic comedy on the "Taming of the Shrew" theme needs a much more dominant hero than the rather colourless Guy Madison, an actor whom I had not come across before except for a minor role in "Since You Went Away". (If this film is typical of the standard of his work, it is hardly surprising that he is no longer a household name). Rhonda Fleming is better as the fiery red-headed Cheyenne, although she is not good enough to carry the film on her own. Her looks, moreover, do not really suggest the Indian blood with which she is credited by the script.

"Bullwhip" is typical of the many Western B-movies that were churned out by the studios in the fifties. Such films were rarely spectacularly bad, and this one is not. Technically, it is competently made, the actors for the most part play their parts adequately if not particularly well. Nevertheless, it never rises far above the level of the mediocre, which it might have done had there been a greater rapport between the two leads. 5/10

Here's an example of Plot #37 -- the couple forced to wed under unusual circumstances who seem to detest each other at first but who slowly, inevitably fall in love. Since the plot holds no surprises, the success of any film using Plot #37 largely depends on its two leads. Do they have the right chemistry? And does the script give them good dialog to toss back and forth?

Alas, Rhonda Fleming and Guy Madison lack the necessary spark, and both of them seem a bit over-the-hill for this kind of romance. Their lines are without style and wit and the course of their relationship manages to proceed both predictably and unconvincingly at the same time.

An air of sexism and racism pervades the movie and its depiction of the Old West, but in ways that are more amusing than offensive. Seeing Rhonda Fleming in her Indian maiden outfit, complete with feather, has a campy charm.

Not surprisingly, Guy Madison gets to take his shirt off in order to display the chest which once adorned the inside door of a thousand high-school lockers. Though slightly faded at age 35 or so, this chest is still easy on the eyes and it's so unshaved as to be downright furry.

In which I woud have prefectly imagined Barbara Stanwyck. But Rhonda Fleming is OK in this role and for which you can unfortunately foresee the ending. This is a pretty good little western, and do not confound with Chuck Marquis Warren's BLACKWHIP nor Harmon Jones' - the same director as this one - SILVER WHIP, starring Dale Robertson and made for 20th Century Fox. Nothing fantastic, exceptional. Harmon Jones is a director whose films would deserve to be discovered again by old gems diggers. For me women are not necessarily made to be monitored, dominated by males, and in his kind of schemes - strong females - in most cases they finally.... Know what I mean? I love strong male stories and I am also a feminist in the same time.