7 Women (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Sep 29, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
John FordRelease Date(s)
1966 (August 26, 2025)Studio(s)
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Warner Archive Collection)- Film/Program Grade: A-
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B-
Review
John Ford’s final feature, 7 Women (1966) sharply divides critics. Biographer Scott Eyman’s Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford dismisses it completely, insisting Ford’s heart wasn’t in it, that he knew he had a lousy picture before it had even begun. Conversely, Joseph McBride’s Searching for John Ford champions the film and McBride, who interviewed Ford on the day he officially retired, conversely quotes Ford saying it was “one of my favorite pictures.”
Ford was, of course, best-known for his great Westerns—Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—indeed, six of his last eight features were Westerns. But, of course, he made all kinds of movies and many of his greatest weren’t Westerns at all: The Grapes of Wrath, The Long Voyage Home, How Green Was My Valley, They Were Expendable, The Quiet Man.
7 Women, despite its unusual subject matter, reflects many of Ford’s career-long themes and preoccupations, found in both his Westerns and non-Westerns. It has some of the same late-career old-fashioned filmmaking qualities critics complained hurt Chaplin’s A Countess from Hong Kong and Hitchcock’s Topaz, yet in other respects it feels modern and even progressive. With its feminist heroine, it certainly contradicts the conventional wisdom of late-career Ford as a far-right conservative. 7 Women is almost completely studio-bound, with 95% of it shot on a huge soundstage, and the film in many ways plays like a throwback to Ford’s ‘30s films. Yet, somehow, Ford was right: “It was a swell story and a good script so I did it,” he told McBride. And, indeed, it is.
In 1935 China, Miss Agatha Andrews (Margaret Leighton) heads a remote Christian mission post. The film’s sole white male character is teacher Charles Pether (Eddie Albert), a sad and frightened little man acting out earlier ambitions to become a preacher. His 42-year-old wife, Florrie (Betty Field) is both high-maintenance and very pregnant, a high-risk delivery due to her menopausal age. (Field was pushing 50 and looks it.) Sanctimonious Andrews lords over the mission like a private fiefdom, controlling subordinate missionaries Jane Argent (Mildred Dunnock), her assistant, and 20-something Emma Clark (Sue Lyon, of Lolita), whom Andrews clearly desires sexually.
In this environment arrives Dr. Cartwright (Anne Bancroft), a scotch-drinking, chain-smoking physician decked out like Amelia Earhart, upending Andrews’s oppressively-run mission, she upset when Cartwright turns up at dinner in a cloud of cigarette smoke, her proto-feminist swagger and refusal to kowtow to Andrews’s strict rules fascinating the others, particularly Emma. Cartwright immediately takes charge when cholera breaks out following the arrival of missionary refugees, including Miss Binns (Flora Robson) and Mrs. Russell (Ford favorite Anna Lee), the doctor’s tireless dedication to her patients and leadership seen as a threat to Andrews’s authority. Her kindness toward the thoroughly unlikeable, demanding Mrs. Pether further strains Cartwright’s relationship with Andrews.
Yet, a much more existential threat looms, when thuggish Mongolian warlord Tunga Khan (Mike Mazurki) arrives with his marauding bandits, imprisoning the white women and almost immediately killing nearly all the Chinese, including the children. The white women would certainly be doomed if not for Dr. Cartwright’s perseverance, whose dedication to the preservation of life, extending even to the pathetic “bunch of kooks,” as Ford described them, puts this brave, intelligent woman to the ultimate test.
7 Women is kind of like a Western (an isolated group far from civilization up against savage indigenous people), kind of like Powell & Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (sexually-repressed Christian missionaries beguiled by mysterious Asian peoples and culture they don’t begin to understand, their lives thrown asunder by outside influences). Visually, Ford’s film looks nothing like Powell & Pressburger’s masterpiece; partly for budgetary reasons, probably owing to Ford’s declining health, and partly deliberately, nearly the entire film is confined to within the walls of the mission, the whole shebang a massive set on MGM’s biggest soundstage.
Critics then and now complained about its studio-bound look, but I think it adds to the film’s claustrophobic tension, and Warner Archive’s excellent Blu-ray shows off how the careful lighting and Panavision cinematography make it moodily effective. It may not be entirely convincing, but it works in a “movie reality” sense. After all, Black Narcissus wasn’t shot on location in Asia, either, but entirely on the studio lot in England.
One is also reminded of the incredible tension Ford created with his soundstage exterior/interior dramatizing Indian Scar’s murderous raid on the Edwards isolated family home in The Searchers. There’s something like that here: Eddie Albert’s character struck by the eerie glow of an enormous fire burning in the distance, not comprehending the threat as Tunga Khan pillages and murders in a distant village over the hill. That scene is similarly effective, though Khan’s horseback entrance is disappointing; he just shows up with his men, and the Chinese coolies unwisely fling open the gates.
But who’d have thought John Ford, of all directors, would build a movie around a feminist heroine? Howard Hawks had his tough dames, but it’s easy to forget many of Ford’s women—those played by Maureen O’Hara and Olive Carey, to name two—were hardly shirking violets. The picture started with Patricia Neal as Dr. Cartwright, but less than a week into shooting she suffered a massive stroke and hurriedly replaced by Bancroft. Having just reviewed Imprint’s new Blu-ray of Hud, made with Neal just a few years prior, it was especially easy to imagine Neal as Cartwright. One can see Neal bringing an earthier sexuality compared to Bancroft, and a kind of pithier defiance. Bancroft, though, is excellent, and because she was several years younger, it makes her dedication to the sick and needy all the more powerful.
Mike Mazurki, nearly 60, was a great Moose Malloy in Murder, My Sweet two decades earlier but a little too old and out of his depth in 7 Women, though the part has little in the way of dialogue or subtly. His second-in-command—and sexual rival for Cartwright—is played by another Ford favorite, the magnificent Woody Strode. No more believably Asian than Mazurki, nevertheless one understands why Ford cast them, for an almost evenly-matched fight to the death, Strode all muscle and Mazurki a mountain of brute force.
7 Women was relatively inexpensive, at just $2.8 million (by comparison, the innocuous Our Man Flint, released that same year, cost $3.5 million) and might have even turned a modest profit had MGM not so quickly given up on the film, even releasing it as the bottom-half of double-bills. Further, six minutes were cut after a disastrous preview. At 87 minutes it’s Ford’s shortest film since The Rising of the Moon in 1957. Two of the cut scenes occur outside the camp and perhaps weren’t necessary; one expanded upon the rivalry between the two Mongols, but cutting them and thus keeping virtually the entire story confined to the mission wasn’t necessarily a bad idea. However, another cut scene made plain Andrews’s arrogance early on, when Jane Argent applies to run her own mission but is rejected, Andrews haughtily lectures, “The Lord has created some to command and some to serve.” In her middle age, Margaret Leighton projected a cold-eye steeliness well-suited for such a part. Not surprisingly, one of her last roles was as Miss Havisham in a British television adaptation of Great Expectations. (Bancroft also played Havisham near the end of her life, but who’d believe anyone would abandon her at the altar?)
The missing footage exists, but is not included even as an extra feature, let alone restored back into the film. Without seeing the cut footage it’s impossible to say whether the scenes outside the mission would have enhanced 7 Women, but the confrontation described above is a significant loss, and apparently all three scenes make sense of actions that occur later in the story. The sexual rivalry between the Mazurki and Strode characters is apparent even in the cut theatrical version, but a Blu-ray or 4K release with these scenes restored or at least included as extra features, along with an informed audio commentary would put 7 Women into better context.
Visually, though, Warner Archive’s Blu-ray looks great. Remastered in 4K, memories of terrible panned-and-scanned TV prints in 16mm fade away, revealing the excellent Panavision compositions by Ford and cinematographer Joseph LaShelle (Laura, Kiss Me Stupid). The DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 mono) is fine, given its limitations, but Elmer Bernstein’s score benefits from the good audio. Optional English subtitles are provided on this Region-Free disc.
John Ford’s Magic Stage is an interesting, somewhat peculiar extra feature, beginning in black-and-white before switching to color and narrated (I think) by Les Tremayne. It follows Ford and others as they examine the construction of the mission set, Ford looking healthier and more energetic than one would have imagined at this point in his career. It appears up-rezzed from an earlier standard-def transfer. (Too bad there’s no footage of Patricia Neal: perhaps her few scenes shot before her stroke also exist.) In high-def is The Dot and the Line, a late-career theatrical short for Chuck Jones. The UPA-style cartoon is narrated by Robert Morley. A rather ragged trailer rounds out the supplements.
John Ford’s 7 Women is a film ripe for reassessment. It’s not an unmitigated success, but it has many fine qualities, and it deserves a release with its cut scenes restored or at least included as an extra feature. And that ending—Wow!—what a career-capper. Highly Recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV