Bullwhip

To be honest I had heard this was pretty bad before I decided to watch it, but I'm never one to let others influence my viewings, in fact I'm more likely to watch something out of defiance! Bullwhip had one thing going for me before the viewing anyway, the fact that Rhonda Fleming and those gorgeous eyes was in it. The picture isn't very good, and it is in fact very morally dubious, all the characters are corrupt and shifty in one way shape or form, all motivated by greed or egocentric victories, which is all well and good if the surrounding film can at least do justice to a bunch of despicable people to create a taut climax. Sadly it doesn't, and as the finale fills your eyes with sugar you can't help shouting out that you have been cheated into watching a pretty bad film. Nobody in the cast come out with any credit, with lead man Guy Madison particularly wooden in the extreme.

Not even the lovely Rhonda can make me recommend this to anyone. 3/10

"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

Despite claiming self-defence, Steve finds himself in jail with nothing ahead of him but a short drop to the end of a rope. When the judge that sentenced him, offers him a way out, Steve suspects he has been set up but has no room to turn the offer down. So it happens then that Steve is married to Cheyenne – a fiery young woman, whose father's will states that she will inherit nothing unless she marries within so many days. With the papers signed, Steve is let out of jail with no knowledge of who his new wife is and quickly finds that he was not pardoned – only freed, so a posse of men are after him immediately. Steve gets offered a chance to get after his wife and claim his rights as her husband by sinister businessman Parnell and thus he sets of after her wagon train.

Despite the trimmings, western setting and plotting, the basic story here is very much a simple case of "man and woman dislike each other while the audience wonder if they will overcome differences and perhaps even fall in love". The answer to this question is unlikely to have audiences on the edge of their seats but the film does just about manage to entertain even if it never really does anything that special or interesting. The story treads the usual path but has some humour, action and intrigue to make for a distracting affair that more of less does the job for an undemanding afternoon in on a wet weekend. Of course a lot depends on the chemistry between the stars in this sort of plot and unfortunately the delivery isn't good enough on that front.

It isn't that the cast are bad, because they are actually OK but this film could have been lifted greatly by some really sparkling chemistry and interaction between the two leads. Madison is fairly solid in the lead role and does do well with a slight swagger and wry grin; meanwhile Fleming is quite interesting but is never as sexual or as fiery as she needed to have been. The scenes the two share don't work that well either – the audience had to care for both characters and see genuine affection below the surface even in the most argumentative encounters and they can't manage to do that and just come off as, well, two b-movie stars playing opposite each other rather than anything convincing. Adams plays the usual b-movie villain with some relish but didn't make much of an impression on me I'm afraid.

The end result of all these average ingredients is a b-movie that never really rises above par for the course at any point but just about has enough comedy and energy to provide distraction if you are in an undemanding b-movie mood.

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.

I thought it was quite an entertaining western, even though the story isn't very high-quality. Flemming's character is clearly explained right at the beginning of the film through her own voice-over. She's a tough cookie who doesn't want to know anything about love until she meets Steve, of course. It's a shame that this romance isn't really developed strongly. She plays hard to get for a while, but the transition to love is rather abrupt and feels a bit forced.

Rhonda Flemming certainly steals the show in terms of eye candy, and she also acts quite reasonably.

A nice western that's fun to watch once.