What was viewed as an oddity by the star’s legion of fans has turned out to have considerable contemporary appeal, situating Doris Day as an unlikely feminist icon. It was almost the opposite of her current template. She didn’t sing and the narrative was not driven by romantic mishap. It didn’t endear director Andrew V. McLaglen to his fans either after the tough-guy heroics of Shenandoah (1965). And you might also ask the question – was the feminism watered down by slapstick in order to make it more acceptable to the general audience.
One issue extremely relevant today is pretty much skated over. Josie (Doris Day) kills her drunken husband after setting about him with a pool cue. His death was largely misadventure, he fell down the stairs escaping her intended blow rather than as the result of it. What’s the world coming to, muse the men of the town, if a woman could get away with defending herself against a brute of a husband in such a fashion, given it’s accepted that a wife needs knocked about once in a while.
That she gets off seems less to do with understanding than narrative convenience. It turns her into a widow, and deprived of her son (removed by the threat of legal action by her father-in-law) that means she will come in handy for married men fancying an affair. Unable to find respectable work, she has one catastrophic shift as a waitress. In narrative terms this is intended to act as the ultimate humiliation but in terms of screen treatment it’s convenient excuse for slapstick.
For some reason best known to screenwriter Harold Swanton (Rascal, 1969), she appears best placed to influence the female townspeople on a delicate political point. Whether such influence is due to her getting away with bumping off her husband is never made clear. Turns out that women in Wyoming have the vote and in their battle for statehood the men believe that will count against them and want Josie to get them to agree to drop that right. (History tells us that the good folks didn’t enforce that and allowed women to keep the vote, so three cheers for Josie.)
Those two elements – wife-beating and voting – would make a darn good movie right there but they seem to just dip in and out of proceedings unless in some lame humorous instance. What does take center stage though is Josie’s battle for independence, not wishing to “be taken care of” by some man. She argues that “you can’t kick under the rug that women are also people” and agin the notion that a woman is “a species of idiot kept in the back closet and spoon-fed three times a day.”
So she decides to become a cattle rancher. That inflames the ire in equal measure of suitor Jason (Peter Graves) and deadly enemy Arch (George Kennedy). And pretty much she is setting herself up for failure until she comes up with the notion of raising sheep rather than cows. The sheep vs. cows argument has been surprisingly well covered in the western – witness The Sheepman (1958), Heaven with a Gun (1969) and, in more recent times, 1923 (2022) – and here they decide the two animals are best kept apart by geographical divide. The sheep are really another narrative device, cue for more slapstick-style sequences, and as you know a sheepdog will tear the britches off anyone foolish enough to get in its way.
It’s somewhat astonishing that within this unwieldy set of confounding narratives that this works at all. And mostly that is down to Doris Day (With Six You Get Eggroll, 1968) junking her previous persona of feisty female willing to be wooed by ardent or cunning male. While her anger often comes over as more like petulance and you would never mistake her for an Elizabeth Taylor or Maureen O’Hara as a woman not to cross, she does comes out of this with some credit. Peter Graves (Sergeant Ryker, 1968) and George Kennedy (The Pink Jungle, 1968) are merely adequate. Andrew V. McLaglen doesn’t show much gift for comedy apart from the most obvious but presumably he’s to be thanked for even venturing into such difficult territory.
Whether it was, as I said, a deliberate attempt to bring feminist issues to the fore, or to sneak them in under the guise of comedy, is a moot point. The star always claimed she was duped into the role, finding her husband Martin Melcher had signed her up for it without her knowing.
The Magnificent 60s 