Painted Angels

I just watched this film. It was unrelenting, a story of the rough circumstances prostitutes endured in the West a little more than a century ago. Its a woman's story, almost totally without a male point of view. The men are represented as beings who mostly just mumble and play cards. Their voices are heard often muttering on the soundtrack. We can't make out what they're actually saying. Representing the guys as stick figures helps emphasize in what reduced and lonely circumstances the prostitutes inhabit their dance hall and saloon world. There are no women who are not prostitutes in this early western town. Just as the men have little regard for the women, the women think little of the men. I think this may be a fairly truthful accounting of the West before it was civilized. The film has got me thinking about how desperate male-female relationships may have been in America not all that long ago.

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Philip French Sunday 20 June 1999 guardian.co.uk

Painted Angels (1998, 15, Artificial Eye, Rental/Retail) In Ride the High Country (1962), Sam Peckinpah put the whores into the horse opera, making the once taboo subject of frontier prostitution a proper theme for Westerns. Jon Sanders' unsentimental, non-prurient Painted Angela, one of the most realistic accounts of sex out West, concerns the girls in a brothel run by ruthless Irish madam Brenda Fricker on the fringe of a bleak prairie town in the 1880s. A socially detailed, achingly moving story of brutality and occasional tenderness is unfolded with considerable subtlety. The cast, headed by Kelly McGillis, is flawless.

It simply doesn't. I agree that the title "Wicked Wicked West" is not a good one for what this film is. It's actually a terrible title. But the film itself is a noble effort at realistically portraying something that most Westerns don't really give a crap about, the women of "easy virtue". In many movies set in this time and place, the prostitute characters (often barely qualifying as full characters) are just taken for granted: jolly, good fun, not really are they problematic, but seen more the context of innocent male back-slapping fun. No harm done, right? Well, this is more like what it really was. I visited Tombstone, Arizona a while ago and between the touristy things there was also a small exhibit about what the lives of prostitutes were like. It is the saddest thing ever. The women as in this film are on the lucky end the the spectrum, as they themselves realize and often say. There were many, many women in this line of work in the old West, and the hopelessness of their situation was just beyond belief. Diseases, abortions, laudanum abuse. And all of it is real, real, real historical documented real.

So yeah, as one reviewer commented, they make sex look boring. You know why? Because it *was* boring. Without intimacy, without love, fraught with the danger of disease and pregnancy (without modern medicine!)... given these conditions, isn't that the best it could be? The film itself was a bit boring in parts, but I liked the interactions of the characters. As far as historical fiction in film goes, there has been lots worse. And this is nowhere near the worst movie anybody has seen--- I mean it, the other reviewers are being a bit disingenuous here! To make a point, I suppose, that this is not their cup of tea. Fine, but it's still tolerably good stuff.

The preceding user comments are all painfully accurate.

This movie is slow and boring. However, it does depict, in a gritty, realistic way, the allegedly good old days that some people think were superior in every way to our modern era.

Most folks back then lived the kind of dreary existence that this movie portrays. In this case, the dreariness is prostitution in the boondocks.

On the plus side, the movie was beautifully filmed. The lighting in the brothel at night was appropriately dim, which certainly renewed my appreciation for electricity.

However, the sound is awful. The actors mumble, and a few of them mumble with a thick accent, so I'm sure I missed dialog that was probably important to the story.

Some scenes had me stumped. For instance, the theatrical piece with the horse. What the heck was THAT all about??

The film is made in the manner of a dark brooding Scandinavian melodrama and is more of a slice of the darker side of prostitution. I saw it on video by Sterling and they should be shot for the box promotion which indicated more of a sensual sexual randy tale: "Expert in the pleasures of the flesh, these women...put the wild in the west." Obviously the person writing this did not bother to watch the film. On the video cover three saloon dressed typed women were added (none of whom were in the movie) further adding to the false advertising of the film. Yes it is slow and even boring and hardly uplifting, but it is a tale of women trapped in a degrading 'lifestyle.' The nudity in this film is about as titilating as the nudity in Jennifer Connelly's "Requiem for a Dream".