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Admirable Alterity on the Frontier: French Women’s Agency in the Hollywood Western (1931-1980)

The article explores a corpus of Hollywood Westerns spanning a fifty-year period between 1931 and 1980 in which Frenchwomen are prominent agents on the Western frontier. It suggests that while the American film industry has had a long-standing esteem for French culture, it was during the 1950s that Hollywood began to promote systematically positive representations of Frenchwomen in the Western. It proposes that a genre of “Frenchness Westerns” emerged in the 1950s as a sub-genre of commercially successfully “Frenchness films” (Schwartz 2007) such as An American in Paris (1951) and Gigi (1958). Issuing from a general climate of American post-war Francophilia, Frenchwomen in the “Frenchness Western” are intelligent and daring, even outdoing American male heroes. These women are understood as incarnating an “admirable alterity,” and are often compared to indigenous and Mexican women, sometimes aiding the latter in the sphere of interracial romance. These broadly positive representations of the Frenchwoman as agent and potential ally to other women would last until 1980 and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. This essay suggests that the commercial failure of this film seems likely to have had a hand in ending the presence of Frenchwomen in the Hollywood Western—Frenchness becoming synonymous with the financially unviable.