Maverick Queens: The Fabulous Women of Lone Pine

The long, long history of filmmaking in Lone Pine and surrounding areas has benefited from the contribution of many great women filmmakers. Over the years these great women have not received their due recognition. This is maybe because the great number of action-adventure based films (that is, lots of Westerns) that were filmed in the area have conventionally tended to have masculine attributes with the male hero dominating the plots. Westerns heavily stressed masculinity so many of the women’s roles were seen through the context of the male characters. Men wrote and directed most of the Westerns so women’s roles tended to reflect a male perspective. The women characters displayed traits traditionally thought feminine: passivity, dependence, gentleness and sensitivity, and other traits. If women were given strong characters, they must ultimately depend on a man for their happiness and security. The male perspective dominates many of the films made in Lone Pine and the female roles were played out in accordance with male expectations of female behaviour. Perhaps this has contributed to the lack of attention given to wonderful women of Lone Pine.

An exhaustive survey of significant female Lone Pine filmmakers is not possible in this short article so we will aim to spotlight only a limited number of prominent women who made films in Lone Pine. In the past some attention has been directed towards wonderful actresses such as Peggy Stewart, Beth Marion and others, however for this article we will look to the Hollywood “A” list and focus on some well-known names who made the journey to travel from Los Angeles to make films in Lone Pine. Our cohort will include household names such as Barbara Stanwyck, Maureen O’Hara, Rita Hayworth, Ida Lupino and Susan Hayward. It is our intention to pay homage to these wonderful women filmmakers who played smart, unafraid and independent women and who have given so much to the fabulous history of filmmaking in Lone Pine.

Let’s start with one of Hollywood’s greatest – Barbara Stanwyck. No other actress was quite like Babs – she was virtually without peer in the portrayal of tough, fearsome women of the west. She typically played a wise cracking, cynical and aggressive woman, demanding respect and elucidating fear from her male counterparts. Some of her great Westerns were The Maverick Queen (1956), Forty Guns (1957) and The Furies (1950). Unfortunately, she only made one film in the Alabama Hills and that was the range-war Western, The Violent Men (1955). In this film she was able to play with her nasty and duplicitous persona with telling effect. And to boot she was able to work alongside some mighty good actors such as Edward G. Robinson, Glenn Ford and Brian Keith. Stanwyck loved getting into the saddle and putting on the gun belt and she loved Lone Pine. Before she died she requested that her ashes be scattered over the Alabama Hills. No one quite matched Barbara Stanwyck’s strutting feistiness.

The Love Goddess of the 1940s – Rita Hayworth also made only one film in the Alabama Hills – The Loves of Carmen (1948). And this film was also made with Glenn Ford who it seems had a romantic Lone Pine affair with his co-star, Rita. One would think that Rita would make a perfect Carmen however this film seems to lack a certain sizzle but the sequences shot out in the Alabama Hills are wonderful to watch. Rita’s Carmen seductively eats an orange and as she drapes herself in the sun across a granite boulder that almost seems to vaporise under her. Poor befuddled Glenn Ford, as Don José, understandably cannot resist her.

Rita Hayworth may have had some say in the selection of the Alabama Hills as a key location for this film. This was the first film chosen and co-produced by Hayworth’s production company, the Beckworth Corporation, which gave her approval over her material and production details such as filming locations as well as a percentage of the film’s profits.

20th Century Fox produced two fabulously entertaining Lone Pine Westerns which feature feisty, spunky female characters. The films were Yellow Sky (William Wellman, 1948) and Rawhide (Henry Hathaway, 1951). The directors, Wellman and Hathaway, both loved strong, tough and assertive female characters and that is what we get in these two films.

Anne Baxter, who always saw herself as a serious actor and not a Hollywood personality plays “Mike” – an indomitable, pistol-packing tomboy, she took no lip from the lusty outlaws in Yellow Sky. The year before Yellow Sky was released Baxter won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as Sophie MacDonald in The Razor’s Edge (1946) and a few years later she would receive another Oscar nomination for her performance in All About Eve (1950). Not only does Mike sock Gregory Peck to the ground in Yellow Sky but she also gets to assault Peck’s screen image by requesting that his character, Stretch eliminate his distasteful body odour by bathing post-haste.

Another Oscar winning actress was Susan Hayward – she won hers for her portrayal of death row inmate Barbara Graham in I Want to Live! (1958). In Rawhide, she (Vinnie Holt) and co-star Tyrone Power (Owens) are held hostage by a gang of four murdering prison escapees who are bent on robbing the soon-to-arrive scheduled stagecoach. The couple, with Vinnie’s infant niece (Callie) are virtually locked in a room in the stagecoach relay station. The oppressive claustrophobia of their incarceration within the restricted space contrasts with the grandeur of the Sierra Nevada mountains but Hayward’s Vinnie deals with the so-called woman-tamers and proves to be resourceful and resolute (and like Baxter in Yellow Sky… very handy with a gun!).

Another member of the Lone Pine female cohort to win an Oscar was Joan Fontaine. Joan was the romantic interest for Douglas Fairbanks, Jr in George Steven’s ripping epic, Gunga Din (1939). Joan Fontaine won her Oscar a few years later for her role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941).

A major contributor to Lone Pine movie history is an actress who should have won an Academy Award but who didn’t. This Hollywood legend was Ida Lupino. And arguably she could have won an Oscar not only for acting but also for directing. (Ida did win a number of awards including the 1973 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress.) As some film commentators have stated Ida Lupino was one of Hollywood’s best actresses of the 1940s. She supports this claim with her wonderful performance as Marie in High Sierra (1941) which was filmed in and around Lone Pine in 1940. Although Humphrey Bogart’s “Mad Dog” Roy Earle falls from the mountain and dies at the end of the film it is Lupino’s final scene where, through her tears, we can feel that Earle has indeed “crashed through” and found freedom, if only in death.

About a dozen years later Ida returned to Lone Pine in 1953 to direct The Hitch-Hiker (1953). The tenacious Ida Lupino was then the only woman director working in Hollywood, and she cleverly manoeuvred around daunting gender-based obstacles to direct. Two of her films – The Hitch-Hiker and Outrage (1950) – have been selected for the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. The Hitch-Hiker was the first mainstream American film noir to be directed by a woman. It is a nerve-wracking suspense movie which is now recognized as one of the best movies made in the Lone Pine area. The plot is based on a true story and it tells of two vacationing fishermen who were taken hostage and systematically terrorised by a sadistic psychopath. The film is brilliantly helmed by Lupino with the very able assistance of ace RKO Pictures cinematographer, Nicholas Musuraca. The interior visuals of three men entombed in the late 1940s Plymouth contrasted with the harsh, foreboding, treeless desert of dust and boulders (Alabama Hills) created a very unsettling state of hopelessness.

Far removed from the grim and brutal reality of The Hitch-Hiker was Natalie Wood’s stellar performance as plucky photojournalist and suffragette, Maggie Dubois in Blake Edwards’ slapstick comedy, The Great Race (1965). Only a small portion of The Great Race was filmed in the Lone Pine area but the sequence is pivotal in demonstrating Maggie’s doggedness and resourcefulness – she ingeniously uses her carrier pigeons to help The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis) who is stuck in the desert without petrol. It is actually a wonderful location and provides a very popular photo opportunity for participants of Lone Pine location tours.

Maureen O’Hara, Hollywood’s ultimate Irish lass was in two Lone Pine films. Both are curious considering Maureen’s background as they are Arabian-nights adventure sagas set in long-ago Persia. One, the aptly titled Flame of Araby (1951) sees the flame-haired beauty wrestling with Jeff Chandler out amongst the boulders in the Alabama Hills. The other, Bagdad (1949) makes top use of the Olancha sand dunes filling in for the Arabian desert. She thought the films were “lousy” and she is not wrong. She was probably comparing them to the movies she made with John Ford and John Wayne.

We have praised a few wonderful women but there are many more and it would be negligent not to also mention some the many women who were not stars. The gutsy Polly Burson, stuntwoman extraordinaire, for one. Her amazing fall-from-wagon stunt when she was doubling Felicia Farr (another great Lone Pine actress) in Audie Murphy’s Hell Bent for Leather (1960) is jaw-dropping. Independent and proficient with gun, rope and horse was Gail Davis, TV’s Annie Oakley (1954-57). Gail with Dale Evans – “The Queen of the Cowgirls” gave girls of the 1950s two clear positive role models. These girls didn’t want to be quiet and “lady-like” but wanted to play rough and tough with the boys.

There have been so many wonderful women who through their stellar star quality, charisma, talent and beauty have added so much to the rich and fascinating film legacy that makes Lone Pine unique. Barbara Stanwyck, Anne Baxter, Rita Hayworth, Susan Hayward and the other major actresses who made significant films in the Lone Pine area portrayed strong, intelligent, assertive and capable women who knew how to take care of themselves and were not only the equal of their male counterparts but also women who never seemed insignificant within the majestic yet unforgiving landscape of the Sierra Nevada range and the Alabama Hills. These women were the driving force of many films including Rawhide, Yellow Sky and The Violent Men. We salute the ladies of Lone Pine!

Lone Pine Festival regulars, Ross Schnioffsky and Warren Davey, will beam in via the internet from Australia a multimedia, illustrated talk on the ladies of Lone Pine. The presentation will be in the Museum theatre and the guys promise all the usual colored lights, bangs and whistles but nothing to scare the children or horses.