On the border of Mongolia in 1935, American missionaries suffer through starvation, cholera, a menopausal woman about to give birth, an attack by vicious bandits and the arrival of a chain-smoking, salty-tongued female doctor/atheist (Anne Bancroft) who usurps the power of the self-appointed leader (Margaret Leighton, whose nervous fascination with the minister's daughter, comely Sue Lyon, is vaguely lesbian in nature). Director John Ford's final film is brief and inexpensive, seemingly shot all on one sound-stage with few trimmings (when Lyon is told to take the children "into the fields," one wonders where exactly those fields are). So many different styles of acting are brought to the fore that it appears nobody knew how to approach this material. For his part, Ford may have been relishing the clashes (character and otherwise); his pacing tends to pick up whenever the conflicts threaten to get really nasty. I liked Anne Bancroft's straightforward, no-nonsense personality, Lyon is charmingly self-conscious, while Leighton is heinously hissable playing a completely unsympathetic "dictator" with high-flown manners (amusingly, she's never given a chance to redeem herself--and on at least two occasions is told to shut up--so that we nearly sympathize with her, but the screenwriter has her rigid and vile right up until the end). The climax is solid and satisfying, but filmed with a wink by Ford, as if to say "It's all b.s. anyway." ** from ****
Review of 7 Women
