Painted Angels

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.

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??

While the movie would not attract mainstream audiences, it did portray life how it must have been somewhere in the USA in the late 1800's.

The competition between the two places to get the judge to approve of their establishment was an interesting topic. Outdoing each other in their "shows" for the judge. Also the reality of older girls not making money, having to leave and the consequences of what happens then.

Also the scene where the guy is shot in the bar, as we are seeing life from the girls viewpoint, they would not know the reasons behind this, so neither did we.

All in all a good historical perspective movie, showing the stark/slow reality of a snapshot of life then.

The movie is slow, but it's nicely shot. And the slowness is like a metaphor, for their lives. Their lives were slow. What did people do in the prairies in the middle of winter in 1890? Nothing So,the film mimics their lives and forces us to slow down to their pace. Kelly McGillis is a sweetheart, she always has been and should have more leading roles than she does. She is my dream lady.

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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