Seven women was John Fords last- and one of his very best color movies. Strange and beautiful - about the fate of a group of women - during the boxer rebellion in China hundred years ago. It was a kind of a swansong (1966) for him - and he was very happy (and proud) about it - but its characters might be to strange and challenging for many movie lookers?? It is at least very underrated! I hope it will change in the future, so we can buy it on DVD. The acting and all situations in the movie are appealing and absolutely astonishing!!
Quotes from the review in New York Times May 5, 1966:
"Imagine a bunch of isolated, pristine mission ladies captured by bloodthirsty Mongolian banditsthis, mind you, under the great director, John Ford. Add a heady, female bevy of players like Margaret Leighton, Flora Robson, Mildred Dunnock, Betty Field and, emphatically, Anne Bancroft in the role begun by the stricken Patricia Neal...
Mr. Ford's picture, which gets off to a graphic, arresting start (with some ripe Elmer Bernstein music) tapers off to a stark, bony melodrama of female hysteria and mayhem...
And Mr. Ford has gotten professional performances, in the main, from his tense, but transparent study of violence besetting an American mission in 1935. But the story edges to a grim, foregone conclusion, underscored by nagging, neurotic yowling, led by Miss Leighton and Miss Field...
What steadies the film and almost severs it, in fact, is a sizzling, earthy performance by Miss Bancroft, as a profane hard-bitten doctor whose arrival tilts the mission even before the barbarians roar into view. Miss Bancroft, a little mannered heretofore, is simply wonderful, from her first bleak appraisal of the premises to the obvious, tragic fadeout, by which time the mission seems like an Oriental East Lynne..."
Quotes from the review in New York Times May 5, 1966:
"Imagine a bunch of isolated, pristine mission ladies captured by bloodthirsty Mongolian banditsthis, mind you, under the great director, John Ford. Add a heady, female bevy of players like Margaret Leighton, Flora Robson, Mildred Dunnock, Betty Field and, emphatically, Anne Bancroft in the role begun by the stricken Patricia Neal...
Mr. Ford's picture, which gets off to a graphic, arresting start (with some ripe Elmer Bernstein music) tapers off to a stark, bony melodrama of female hysteria and mayhem...
And Mr. Ford has gotten professional performances, in the main, from his tense, but transparent study of violence besetting an American mission in 1935. But the story edges to a grim, foregone conclusion, underscored by nagging, neurotic yowling, led by Miss Leighton and Miss Field...
What steadies the film and almost severs it, in fact, is a sizzling, earthy performance by Miss Bancroft, as a profane hard-bitten doctor whose arrival tilts the mission even before the barbarians roar into view. Miss Bancroft, a little mannered heretofore, is simply wonderful, from her first bleak appraisal of the premises to the obvious, tragic fadeout, by which time the mission seems like an Oriental East Lynne..."