Wobbly Utopia

Let’s be honest, Star Trek has had some bad press over the years. Its gender politics were sometimes a bit wonky. Its racial politics also wobbled a bit. Its view of homosexuality was that it didn’t exist, and if it did, only aliens were gay (and if they were hot, semi-naked female aliens, so much the better). Most people in the Western world have seen at least one episode of the original series, and if they saw it at any point other than the ’60s, they may have formed some negative views. There were probably Forehead Aliens involved, and the sets probably wobbled a bit. Captain Kirk spoke… with many… pauses… and… gestures. Spock raised an eyebrow. McCoy said, “He’s dead, Jim,” and at least one redshirt died to prove it was serious. And maybe it was interesting at the time, and had some interesting ideas, but then ten million spin-offs followed, and then there was a film, and Zoe Saldana ran around in a miniskirt while Chris Pine fought Zachary Quinto in an erotically-charged episode of fisticuffs on the bridge.

This is all true, and the less said about the debacle of Enterprise, the better. But the thing is, none of this detracts from the achievements of the original series. I’ll start with this cast photo…

Original Trek, second season cast. Image (c) Paramount

You’ll notice several things immediately:

1) everyone is wearing implausible outfits and has magical levitating hair;

2) the women are in miniskirts; and

3) the Russian guy is definitely wearing a wig.

But look a bit closer. This is a second season cast photo, so that places it in 1967/8, in a show marketed as “Wagon Train to the Stars”. There are people of different ethnicities and backgrounds, and there are also two women. Neither are secretaries.

I could talk at length about what Star Trek has done in promoting a vision of a multicultural, utopian future. The crew included a Russian crewmember at a time when the Cold War was going strong; it included a Japanese crewmember not so very long after WWII and not in a chop socky or waiter role. It featured the first interracial kiss on American television, when Kirk and Uhura are forced to embrace in the otherwise execrable episode, Plato’s Stepchildren. (In fact, the actors ensured that the actual kiss, rather than a simulated one, was shown, by pulling faces in all subsequent retakes.) The Federation itself is a multicultural utopia, where member nations hate each other and violently disagree on everything, and yet will work together for the common good just the same.

Living in the Future

I could focus instead on the technological impact. I could talk about classic Trek ‘inventing’ a cornucopia of future tech, from mobile phones to warp drive to transporters. Sure, warp drive remains an impossibility, and thus far transporters have only managed to send bits of plastic from one transporter to another, more akin to The Prestige than true teleportation, but how many people were thinking about it at all before Trek dreamed it up? Someone always has to dream up the idea before it can be invented. Sure, Trek only invented their Feinbergers because they didn’t have enough money and had to make do from scrounging through the waste bins of other shows, but that’s the beauty of it. Other people’s rubbish – when painted purple and hung on the wall – was enough to inspire people. Now that’s impressive.

Fandom

Or I could discuss the creation of slash fiction, of how it came about in the 1970s in response to the cancellation of Trek. Of how fans – primarily female and in their 20s and 30s – loved the characters and missed them so much that they got together and wrote stories for them. Many of them got published and ended up on the New York Times bestseller list – AC Crispin’s Yesterday’s Son was a fanzine before it was a book, for instance. I could talk about how they took the names Kirk and Spock and made them into Kirk/Spock, the slash in the middle indicating a homoerotic relationship. I’ve read the early slash efforts, and frankly, they’re not terribly good: it’s primarily people writing about sex they’re not having, in plots that aren’t convincing, with art that is a bit lacking. But the thing is, it’s astonishing that those early fanzines existed at all, that communities sprung up with such fervour and dedication to focus on one little show, long-cancelled. These days, ‘slash’ means an m/m story, irrespective of fandom. Many young fans have no idea of the origin of the term and, influenced in equal measure by anime yaoi naming conventions, will mark the pairing with an x (eg. KirkxSpock), yet still refer to the relationship as ‘slash’. The name endures.

That’s not all that Trek decided online. When the internet started up, the Trek groups had a tricky problem: both classic and TNG‘s main characters shared letters. This was a disaster at a time when Usenet was the main source of contact, and subject lines were limited to a small number of characters. Naming and pairing conventions quickly sprang up, with the order of the letters indicating the pairing. American film rating systems were brought into use. [FIC] TOS: New Dawn, K/S, Mc, NC-17 (1/1) was instantly decipherable as a post title. Trek fandom has had a massive impact on fandom in general, its conventions and rules seeping through a multitude of others.

Making History

Then there are the people that Trek has influenced. How about Rev. Martin Luther King, for example? In a candid conversation with Nichelle Nichols, he expressed his admiration for her work as Uhura, and urged her to remain on the show at a time when she was considering quitting. Or maybe Dr Mae Jamison, the first African American woman in space. She, too, watched the show as a child and was inspired by the example that Nichelle Nichols’ Uhura set.

“I’ll protect you, fair maiden.”

“Sorry, neither!”

– Sulu tries to ‘rescue’ Uhura, but she’s having none of it in the first season episode, The Naked Time.

Mae Jamison, being awesome.

How can you NOT love a show that gives you this much awesomeness?

“Ah,” I hear you cry, “but you’ve only talked about the impact of the show, not the show itself! I distinctly recall some dodgy gender politics at work…”

A Handy Viewing Guide for the New Recruit

Yes. OK, I admit it. Star Trek, like many shows at the time, had its writing farmed out to a pool of writers that took story outlines and turned them into scripts. Maybe they knew and loved the show and its characters, maybe they didn’t know them from Adam. Sometimes you had Harlan Ellison delivering City on the Edge of Forever, and sometimes you had Arthur Heinemann’s The Way to Eden, where space hippies sing songs and the viewer writhes in agony. So what? No show out there can claim to have 100% hit rate, and when Trek got it right, they really got it right. So here are a few episodes to check out, mostly from Season 1, but a couple from the later seasons:

1. Where No Man Has Gone Before: where two members of the crew develop god-like powers and the inevitable happens. There is gratuitous eye-candy, in the shape of Kirk’s bared chest. Meanwhile the lead female character is dressed in exactly the same uniform as everyone else, down to the ridiculous bell-bottoms. She’s the ship’s psychiatrist, and ends up saving the day… sort of.
2. Charlie X: where a young boy with god-like powers… yes, OK. But this is a creepy, scary little episode, with eye candy provided by the semi-naked Kirk wrestling for no apparent reason. More disturbing is Charlie’s attempted rape of a crewwoman, his reactions coarse and demanding and selfish, and hers grown-up and mature. He may be the one using violence, but she never once relinquishes her control.

“There’s no right way to hit a woman.”

– James Kirk to Charlie X, after the latter slaps Yeoman Rand’s bottom, Charlie X.

3. The Menagerie: where the original pilot is reworked. Trek does loyalty, captivity, mind-control and extreme measures.
4. Balance of Terror: the Cold War episode, where Kirk informs a crewmember that bigotry has no place on his bridge.
5. Devil in the Dark: where the crew learn not to make assumptions about appearances.
6. City on the Edge of Forever: where Harlan Ellison disavows all knowledge of this rather excellent episode. Kirk, Spock and McCoy end up in 1930s Earth, where Kirk meets Joan Collins, a peace activist who runs a homeless shelter. She’s strong and independent and a visionary, and is unmistakably the love of his life. (Therefore, according to the requirements of drama, she must die.)
7. Mirror Mirror: Where Uhura wears an even more revealing uniform, and evil!Spock mind-invades McCoy.
8. The Enterprise Incident: where the opposing Romulan commander is female, and is tricked in the expected way. What isn’t expected is her dignity throughout. Kirk and Spock treat her throughout as their equal.
9. Is There In Truth No Beauty?: Where Trek had a blind character, and had her as the lead guest character for the episode.
10. Turnabout Intruder: where Kirk and an old flame – who has a grudge – trade bodies. This episode, for all its flaws, is fascinating. Janice Lester was a contemporary of Kirk’s, and they were briefly involved. However, she never got command, something she attributed to her gender. In Trek-world, she has no argument: her gender is irrelevant. In 1960s America, this is something so obvious that it was rarely mentioned: of course her gender stopped her from getting command, no woman could possibly be a military commander! Lester’s fury is so intently realised that you can’t help feeling sorry for her, for all her insanity… and rooting for her, just a little.

“Your world of starship captains doesn’t admit women.”

– Janice Lester, Turnabout Intruder

Trek and Me

Valentina Tereshkova, by Phillip Bond, 2009

So, there it is: my deepest, darkest secret. I studied maths and music as a child because of Trek. I got into fandom because of Trek, trying to navigate newsgroups in a cybercafe at age 13 when an Amstrad was the height of luxury. I have the DVDs, and a few of the books, and many of the friends. And above it all, when people ask what I want to do when I grow up, my immediate, unspoken reaction is, “I want to be an astronaut.”

Tell me that’s a bad thing.

Alright then, Friday Night Lights (the film, not the TV series). It’s the true-ish (true in as much as any Hollywood adaptation of real events is ever true) story of the 1988 Permian Panthers, a highschool American football team based out of Odessa, Texas. Based on the book of the same name by H.G. Bassinger, it’s really quite an amazing depiction of the levels of pressure placed on young players in a town that has nothing else going for it. Odessa is the sort of town where you get into college with a football scholarship, or you stay there and live out the same life your parents did.

It might be a somewhat unusual choice for this site, given that it’s focused entirely on the macho-tastic world of American football, and features less than a handful of female characters – all defined by their relationship to one of the males (the coach’s wife, the quarterback’s mother) – who get maybe 10 lines in total. But stick with me here, because the film does raise a few issues worth discussing.

First up, let’s just cover why this film counts as a favourite. American football, more than perhaps any other sport, is self-mythologising. It builds up a grand narrative, spins out legends, and casts itself as something more than just a bunch of millionaires in armour running into each other. Go watch a highlight video, or an episode of America’s Game, which shows the story of each year’s Superbowl winner. Everything about them, the way the footage is cut, the music, is all part of narrativising the events, making myths. And Friday Night Lights captures that perfectly.

Part of the reason the film captures that feeling so well, and part of what makes it a good film (other than some excellent cinematography and casting) is the soundtrack. The film is almost entirely accompanied by the work of Explosions in the Sky, a sweeping instrumental act native to Texas, where the events take place. Take a listen to this and tell me it doesn’t make you want to go do something grand.

But enough of the fanboying. Let’s look at the issues this film brings up.

The first interesting thing the film handles is issues of race. Texas, particularly the smaller towns, is not well known for its progressive attitude towards racial equality. So when the championship game turns out to be against the state’s first all-black team, Dallas Carter, this is a big thing. And you know what? It’s handled pretty damn well. It can probably best be summed up with one particular quote. The coaches and assorted hangers-on of both teams have met to discuss where the game will take place, and how it will be adjudicated to ensure fairness. Asked about referees, the Panthers’ coach suggests hiring a team of officials. Asked whether these zebras¹ will be black or white the coach replies “I believe a zebra’s got about the same amount of black stripes as he does white ones.”

It’s not just the coaches. The players on the Panthers are a pretty varied mix of black, white and Latino. It’s hard to say how much of this is credit to the film makers, and how much is merely a reflection on the make up of the real life team the events are based on. What is definitely to their credit though is the way these characters are handled. The film makers resist the temptation to give us Male White Lead #27b and make the entire film about the quarterback. Instead we get equal screen time devoted to several of the characters (with the arguable show-stealer being Derek Luke as star running back James “Boobie” Miles). It’s nice to see.

The second issue we get in the film, which I’d argue is relevant to basically everyone, is the pressure placed on young people and the struggles of forming an identity. In the context of the film this identity is mostly about defining yourself as a person beyond what your town expects of you as a player. But the basic principle applies to any youthful deviation from accepted norms, which is probably something a fair few readers here have experienced. Telling the world you identify as a feminist might not immediately seem the same as telling your dad you don’t care that much about football, but I think the film does a nice job of showing the universal pressures of youth that tie both experiences together.

Being the champions is basically all the town cares about. On game day, everything shuts down as people leave their workplaces to go watch the game. It’s made clear to the coach that if they don’t win the state championship he should probably think about finding a different down to live in. Win and you’re a local god, lose and you’re a pariah. The alcoholic former-champion father of one character captures this particularly well, kind and caring when the team’s winning, drunk and abusive when his son makes a mistake. How does someone grow and learn to be themselves faced with that?

It’s a good film, it raises some interesting points, and it gives a fascinating look into the life of small town Texas. And for all that it shows the darker side of football, it’s still the film that made me go out and start playing, so it has to get some credit for that.

1. Zebras being a nickname for referees, due to their black and white striped tops.

Unlike the previous film I chose to write about , this one is definitely in my Top Three of all time.

Source: Wikipedia.

I love all the Sergio Leone Westerns. I love the stand-offs, the saloons, the mad Mexican trumpeting – in fact, any music at all by Ennio Morricone.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) is different. It is a death-knell for the cowboy movie. The entire 2-3 hours is about how the world has moved on, and to me that makes it a specifically feminist piece no matter how much it laments that the change is happening.

First of all, take a look at that poster. Of those four faces, who looks like they’re the most important? Whose name is first after the director? Claudia Cardinale. This is a cowboy movie which is largely about a woman who isn’t a gunfighter.

A difference between this and the Dollars westerns that you immediately notice is the pacing. For the first ten minutes, absolutely nothing happens. Three men wait for a train. One catches a fly under the barrel of his gun… then lets it go again. They wait some more. This is a slower, more contemplative movie, and not remotely about how many bandits Clint Eastwood can kill in 90 minutes.

Henry Fonda (famous for playing the good-guy, brilliantly cast here as a ruthless killer of women and children) is hired to shoot Cardinale’s family because they own a piece of land which will be valuable when the railroad comes through. He kills the men and boys, but she hasn’t arrived in town yet. When she discovers she’s now the sole owner of the land, she decides to fight to keep it.

There’s also Charles Bronson at his squinty best as “Harmonica”, a silent man with a debt to settle, and Jason Robards as a bandit whom Fonda tries to frame for the murders. Aaaand… that’s about it.

There are several points at which Cardinale’s character Jill is exploited or attacked, but she refuses to give up. It is a struggle of power, and while the attacks and prejudices suggest that women are still as sidelined as they were in the Middle Ages in my previous post, the owner of the railroad doesn’t even see her as a woman: just a small person who can be bought or murdered to get them out of the way like everyone else. It’s about money, and large companies vs the individual, not women or lone gunmen. It’s barely a cowboy film at all.

And it is very much about money, because that’s the final message. As the good gunmen leave Jill to run the town herself, you don’t know where they or the other loners will go now. The time of individuals carving out the frontier is over. Civilisation has caught up, and their world has been replaced by Banks and Corporations; these men are relics and they know it – powerless, irrelevant, unwanted. The new money allows anyone, of any gender, with no gun skills or army, to live securely and with power over themselves. Jill as a merchant not only represents the death of the Old West, but is the one person who thrives and succeeds in the entire movie. As the romantic vision of the lone gunman rides off into obsolesence, we miss it a little but are reminded that the heroine of the piece would never have had a chance to live in safety under the old ways.

It doesn’t have the quick gratification of the Dollars trilogy, but just a few seconds of the trailer is enough to put a smile on my face. (Interestingly, the trailer depicts nearly every time that Jill is attacked or oppressed, when her character and role is the opposite for most of the actual film. I’m just grateful they managed to put her on the poster without making her boobs or legs the focus.)

None of this is why I love it, of course. It’s the music, the crazy camera shots, the 10-minute scenes, the almost infinite time Leone can spend looking at every crag on someone’s unmoving face while gunfight melodies swell in the background, and the stunning performances from everybody involved. Fonda’s incredibly hard icy eyes. Bronson’s unflinching return gaze. (Top comment on the YouTube link to the trailer is Chuck Norris took one look at Charles Bronson’s eyes and wet himself.) It’s an epic, entertaining masterpiece. It IS cinema. Several scenes were timed to fit with the soundtrack for maximum effect, and the end result is remarkable.

I’ll leave the last line to Wikipedia:

In 2009, it was named to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant and will be preserved for all time.

I’m a movie geek who (along with several of Team BadRep) can’t possibly choose only one favourite film. It’d take me a month just to narrow it down to a top 20. In the end I wrote about two films – this first one precisely because it’s pretty indefensible from a feminist point of view, and the second – which I’ll get to in tomorrow’s post – because I think it is very feminist in a genre where you don’t expect it.

But I also think this choice, my first, has some hidden feminist aspects:

Movie poster for the 1981 film "Excalibur". (Copyright Warner Bros.)

John Boorman’s Excalibur. We’re firmly into ‘Knights In Armour’ territory here, which means the usual relegation of women to being prizes to be fought over, silent Queens, or love interests whose own opinions aren’t asked for, and absolutely nothing else. There’s a debate about whether showing this dynamic is itself feminist if you use it to highlight how unequal and appalling the situation was for women historically (HBO’s recent series Game of Thrones is reigniting this argument, although the source material books for that one are clearer: they start from a position of female oppression and have several characters rebel against it precisely because of the extreme power difference, and makes the readers acknowledge and dislike the inequality).

At first glance though, Excalibur isn’t even trying for feminism points. Its famous heroes are a male King and a male Wizard, some men who all get to be equal to other men around a table, and a man who starts a war over someone else’s wife. And everything goes to hell when one of the few named women sleeps with the man she actually loves.

Looking at the main female characters in detail, we have Igraine who is a pouting, mostly naked object of lust, and played by (somewhat creepily) director John Boorman’s daughter Katrine. She is famously – and this causes wincing every time – naked while being given loving attentions by a man in full plate-mail (surely that would chafe?!).

We also have Guinevere, played excellently by Cherie Lunghi as someone spirited, but increasingly trapped and fragile. I don’t think it counts as a spoiler to reveal that Guinevere falls in love with Lancelot. The fact that she chooses to act on it in defiance of the strict rules around sexual conduct could be seen as empowering (even if it does result in her being sentenced to death, from which she has to be rescued by him).

And we have… Morgana. Played by Helen Goddamn Mirren.

Which is the point at which the film redeems itself a hell of a lot. It’s not just the power of the performances (several of which are brilliant despite the very-1980 effects and pomp) it’s that as well as being the best cinematic retelling of popular Arthurian Legend even today, the movie is filled with iconic archetypes, and they stand out way beyond the plot.

We’re reaching a bit to find any feminism in the movie up to this point, I agree. The source material was put together (in the best-known version) just around the time women were reduced to princesses in towers in storytelling, so maybe it’s not surprising that they’re mostly given similar treatment here. But there is one ray of hope.

Whether this movie counts as having a strong positive female lead eventually depends entirely on whether you think the archetype of The Witch is a positive one.

Morgana is absolutely the classic dangerous magical female. She’s immensely threatening: ambitious, capable, cunning, sexual, malevolent, but also completely outside the rules. She uses seduction as a weapon, and is utterly transgressive – her hate drives her to sleep with Arthur (her half-brother) and have a child (Mordred). This in turn breaks the whole of nature, and specifically the King’s link with the Land.

The only other magic-user (Merlin) is also chaotic and mysterious, but very careful to stay within the boundaries. Morgana is not. She is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, stronger than the King, and stronger than Merlin (and she proves it in both cases). She sees clearly, which (due to the aforementioned sex-in-armour incident) is what sets her on a path of vengeance in the first place. She is owned by no man, with her own desires and plans for her family to gain power. And she succeeds at a great deal of it.

Now okay, it’s not going to raise the banner of feminism very high when this character is unequivocally the Baddie – meant to be feared and mistrusted from the outset. Witches are outcasts, however independent or fearsome that lets them appear. The men Morgana opposes have made her their enemy by being flawed with greed and lust, by abusing her family and fighting endless wars, but we’re not meant to be sympathetic to her. She’s far too lethal and hungry.

As well as the performances, this movie is one of my favourites because of the amazing visuals, the number of people who turn up in early roles (Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, Ciarán Hinds, Patrick Stewart), the fact it has loads of mud and blood in it (unlike many sanitised retellings) and for the sheer bonkers joy of filming a load of knights in armour charging around to the sound of Wagner.

But Helen Mirren and Nicol Williamson (Merlin) really do stand out. What could have been an epic about how ‘men defeat other men to decide which man gets to be top man while a man does some magic’ is instead largely taken over by the brilliant interplay between Merlin and Morgana – the electric, snake-hissing, mountain-deep emnity, the sense of power and caution whenever they invoke their power. They’re much more exciting than Arthur or Guinevere.

Of course, there is a story behind that.

As the director says in his autobiography ‘Adventures of a Suburban Boy‘, Williamson knew Mirren from some years before, when they had a huge falling-out during a production of Macbeth. Boorman told the would-be Merlin that Mirren was likely to be playing Morgana, and the actor immediately changed his reply. (I can’t remember the exact words from his book, but the general idea was as follows):

“Oh, then I couldn’t possibly do it.” “Why not?” “Well, if you must know, she wanted to sleep with me and I turned her down.”

This confused John Boorman. Neither of the pair were known for being shy in that regard. (Helen Mirren ended up dating Liam Neeson during filming…)

Boorman asked Mirren if she wanted to play Morgana, and she was very excited. Then he said Nicol would be Merlin.

“Oh, then no way.” “Why not?” “It’s been awkward ever since he wanted to sleep with me and I said no.”

Not knowing if either of them was telling the truth, Boorman decided to cast them anyway, figuring the tension would be good for the chemistry onscreen. And he was right.

I love the overblown fanfare of this movie (and not just in the soundtrack). It has the best ever “hand holding a sword out of a lake” scene, epic battles, amazing Irish locations, and moments where everything is just focused on Merlin or Morgana saying a few words which change the world. Also, Helen Goddamn Mirren being awesome.

The really bad news is… they’re remaking it. In the last two years both Bryan Singer and Guy Ritchie (!) have been linked to King Arthur movies with the words “remake of Excalibur” from Warner Brothers specifically mentioned. Don’t do it, WB! This version may be knee-deep in Eighties Cheese but it will never be beaten, certainly not by today’s Hollywood. Huge amounts of Eighties Cheese never stopped Robin of Sherwood from being amazing (and in fact still the best version of Robin Hood, despite constant remake attempts) and the two have much in common.

Overall, Excalibur is a bit of a guilty viewing pleasure in feminist terms, but that’s not the case at all with my next pick. That one stands up as a triumph of film-making AND feminism…

Calamity Jane (played by Doris Day) starts off the 1953 musical film of the same name as a tomboy, gets humiliated and learns to be a girl, then gets married. In a dress and everything.

Despite this, it’s one of my very favourite films.

Proud and tomboyish ‘Calam’ is a popular and respected figure in the town of Deadwood. Not just one of the boys, but determined to outshoot, outdrink, outswagger them all. But she’s met her match in Wild Bill Hickok whom she admires and who grudgingly admires her, although they get into one of those “ooh I hate you and don’t fancy you at all, nope” oneupmanship songs. Calam and Bill are comrades, but Calam’s in love with the local Lieutenant Danny, and saves his life, but he’s not interested in her. Because he’s a dick, basically.

Doris Day as Calamity and Howard Keel as Bill Hickock

Anyway, a Proper Lady (Katie) comes to town and becomes friends with Calam, helping her discover her feminine side (I know, I know, just bear with me) and Bill falls unconvincingly in love with her. But when Danny and Katie are discovered KISSING, Calam loses it and threatens to run Katie out of town. She makes a right fool of herself, and Danny is mean about her, but Bill Hickok defends her and goes to console/talk some sense into a bereft Calam. On a still summer night, in a wood, under a silvery moon, etc… they kiss, and conveniently enough it turns out they’ve been in love all along! Everyone makes friends again, Calam marries Bill and Katie marries Danny, even though he’s a knob.

Okay. So there are some tough bits, most notably the repeated references to “female thinking”, and the godawful A Woman’s Touch song. I get through this by donning slash goggles, through which it all becomes rather charming and ironic.

There’s even a symbolic castration of Calam at the end when she and Bill get married – they’re just getting on the stagecoach and he finds she has her gun tucked into her wedding dress. They all laugh and he hands it to some random in the crowd. Then they ride off singing etc.

BUT. There is a lot that is loveable about this film, and it’s not as bad as the details above might suggest.

Firstly, Doris Day’s Calam is a wonderful character. Brave, kind, funny and bursting with energy, she leaps about all over the place, and has a habit of firing at the ceiling to get people’s attention. She’s a tomboy but she’s no freak – everyone in the town is fond of her, respects her and humours her habit of exaggerating her own exploits. She’s accepted, not just tolerated. Her flaw is her pride, and the real point of the story is that it’s her pride which is ‘corrected’ and not her masculine habits.

Secondly, although she is engirlied, she doesn’t become a 50s fembot. She wears a few dresses, but mostly she’s out of her buckskins yet still in trousers. There’s no sign at all she’s going to give up riding the stage (or violently oppressing the indigenous population). I think my favourite bit in the whole film is near the end when she’s racing after Katie’s coach to bring her back to Deadwood, and she passes Bill and his mate on her horse. She thunders past, then stops, turns, rides back, kisses him, and rides off again without a word.

His friend says “I don’t know what kind of life you’ll have living with that catamount… but it ain’t gonna be dull.”

Bill replies: “That’s for dang sure.” He looks delighted.

Thirdly, although it arrives at a supremely convenient time in that way that musicals have, the relationship between Calam and Bill is a convincing one. Throughout the film there are references to their friendship and campaigns together, and they are clearly fond of each other. He sticks up for her when Danny is being disparaging, and tells her early on he thinks she’d be pretty (if she was a Proper Lady, natch). So when Calamity ‘takes off her glasses’ at the Ball (in fact she’s been covered up in a coat she claims was given to her by General Custer) it isn’t as if he’s only just noticed her. And crucially, rather than trying to put her down or get her to act in a more feminine way, his efforts are about bringing her down to earth from her flights of fancy and towering pride.

It’s not a feminist film. It’s not even close. But Calamity is wonderful, and I think better a film with her in it than not at all.

PS. The title is a reference to the most famous song in the film, Secret Love, which has become a bit of a gay anthem. My favourite is The Black Hills Of Dakota, although it has a lot less subtext.

PPS. Don’t come to this film looking for historical accuracy. Here’s some info on the actual Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok.