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I wonder what feminists feel about this film. I found this work to be a fascinating look at women by a male director that can compare with two other cinematic works: Paul Mazursky's "The Unmarried Woman" and Muzaffar Ali's "Umrao Jaan". Strong women, weak women, lesbians, and immature girls, are contrasted with cardboard male characters that are never fully developed and are obviously no match to the array of women portrayed in the film. The men are painted so negatively that one begins to wonder if Ford thought Asian men had more brawn than brain--a strange view that has gained currency in Hollywood cinema.

I applaud Ford's decision to cast Anne Bancroft in this role. This is one of her strong performances. She makes even the most vapid films look elegant with her roles ("Lipstick", "Little Nikita", to name just two). Ford develops her role "7 women" on the lines of a Western gunslinger--only there are no gunfights. The woman has a weapon: sex. That weapon can down all the bad guys faster than it takes to down Mexicans, Red Indians, rustlers, bank-robbers. In this film these bad men are Chinese/Mongolian thugs. Established thespians Dame Flora Robson and Margaret Leighton are totally eclipsed by Bancroft's riveting performance.

What Ford wanted I guess was to stun the viewer with the ending--the twist preceded by the gradual softening of the Bancroft in men's clothes to the Bancroft in women's clothes and the acceptance of male superiority. Most critics have found the end facile but I found the end was powerful as it makes you review and reconsider the strength of the lead character.

The film questions established views on religion; evidently Ford was old enough to have seen enough to choose to make this film in the evening of his life. In his films, Ford's women are as interesting as any other aspect of his cinema and this film provides ample fodder for those interested in studying this element of Ford's work.

However, for a 1966 film, the studio sets for the film look too artificial for the serious cinema the film offers. If anything, the film makes the viewer think!

"Seven Women" is the last feature film of John Ford, arguably the greatest director the United States has yet produced. After a half century of film making, Ford ended his fabled career with a wide screen feature about women in peril at a Chinese mission. Infirm and alcoholic, he filmed it on an MGM sound stage; MGM then cut it and tossed it away on the bottom half of a double bill.

Today, the film is little known and seldom seen. It is far from Ford's best work, yet there is power and believability in many of the lead performances, and power in the arc of the story. Anne Bancroft shines as a feisty New York doctor who ultimately sacrifices herself to save the other missionaries -- many whom she doesn't agree with -- from brutal deaths at the hands of Chinese bandits. Her work here is more forceful and better realized than her role of Mrs. Robinson, done two years later.

The best gift MGM/Sony could give lovers of serious cinema is a clean print of this forgotten film. Its sets are often glaringly artificial, and some of the secondary players are over the top (an old weakness of Ford's) as well as miscast, but "7W" is a far better film than Hollywood legend has told us.

John Ford ended his narrative feature filmmaking career with something different, a story about women instead of men. It's a bit of a mixed bag of a film, showing a lot of the errant storytelling that had become more prevalent of Ford's film in his final decade, but a surprisingly stark ending helps elevate the material in a way that I had not been expecting. Reminding me of how Hitchcock went out with Family Plot, a smaller, lesser film that still managed to entertain while also demonstrating the strengths the filmmaker had developed over the decades.

In a remote mission in rural China, a group of women and one man teach the local children English and in the ways of Christ. One of them, Florrie (Betty Field), is pregnant, nearly due, and having been brought to the mission by her husband Charles (Eddie Albert). The head of the mission, Agatha (Margaret Leighton), has seen the need for a doctor, so she has arranged for the arrival of Dr. D. R. Cartwright (Anne Bancroft), who happens to be a woman, a twist Agatha had not foreseen. What seems like the undergirding conflict of the film will be between the deliriously religious Agatha against the sardonically secular Dr. Cartwright. It never really comes to fruition, though. It's set up so that Agatha and Dr. Cartwright will be duking it out rhetorically and morally for the soul of young Emma (Sue Lyon), the youngest of the missionaries.

What happens instead is a sudden outbreak of cholera after the battle lines of personality have been drawn. With the encroaching march of the Mongolian warlord Tunga Khan (Mike Mazurki), another British mission has abandoned their location and fled to the mission led by Agatha. With them came cholera, and Dr. Cartwright takes charge. She's assertive and action oriented, getting the mission moving in a way that can deal with the outbreak with minimal loss of life, and then it's suddenly over. We go from one scene where the outbreak is on the verge of being taken care of to a celebratory dinner (that Agatha insists on making dour while Cartwright insists on breaking open a bottle of scotch to celebrate) in a cut. I thought it was going to be a running plot element through the rest of the movie, and then it was suddenly over. Okay. Moving on.

That's the first half of the movie, and it's far from great. As a story unto itself, it's oddly built and unsatisfying. As the first half of what comes next, it's still curious but the basic story elements of Cartwright's character, the pregnancy, and the setting have been established well enough to go into what seems to become the point of the film. Tunga Khan arrives with his horde and takes up residence in the mission, Charles having been killed in the village when he tried to help a young girl being raped. He shoves the women into a wooden shed, and Cartwright needs to take charge as much as she can, especially when Florrie goes into labor. Cartwright becomes the face of the women when negotiating with Tunga Khan, offering up her own body as ransom for her medical supplies, hot water, and food.

It would have been better had Cartwright's character been a greater focus of the first half, though. There's little about why she came to rural China for a job. She talks about how women doctors aren't given opportunities to work and that she was also running from a failed relationship with a married man, but that's about it. I don't think enough is given to her early to make these early decisions terribly impactful. It's a strong moment from Bancroft, carrying the weight of her decision well, but I just think it could have been better set up.

This moves us into the film's finale where Cartwright essentially becomes Tunga Khan's prize, his queen. A good thing about this later section of the film is Khan himself. There's no good side to Khan. He's a barbarian and a monster, unrepentant about his crimes and even kills one of his own men (Woody Strode) in one-on-one combat just because. There's no negotiating with this man, no appealing to his humanity. His interest in human life is only what can profit him. So, Cartwright does what she can to provide the freedom of the other women, the titular seven. She gives herself fully to him.

Now, up to this point, I was kind of seesawing back and forth about the movie's worth as a whole, but then the final scene happened. I loved it. It was an ending both dark and hopeful at the same time. It goes to a place with Cartwright that feels just right after what she had gone through and seen in the second half. I think it saves the movie.

I've felt a certain fatigue in Ford's work as his career came to an end, but despite that exhaustion he still manages a solid little tale with his final narrative feature film. It may take until the final moments to push it to that level, but it does get there in the end.

John Ford's swan song is very underrated. Anne Bancroft plays a chain-smoking doctor who has fled the United States (for reasons unknown, unless they were explained during the minute or so I was away to answer the phone) to work at a mission in China. Margaret Leighton plays the head of this mission, a devout Christian who controls her underlings with strict rules. Various troubles ensue, the most prominent being the threat of a cholera epidemic, a raid by Mongolian bandits, and a pregnant woman who is nearing menopause, which makes the birth a very difficult situation. It is the second problem which I mention that takes up most of the plot. The mission has heard stories of these Mongolians in the nearby areas. Leighton is sure that they will never dare attack her mission, by the grace of God and America. But they do, and they keep all the white women hostage after killing off every Chinese person in sight. They believe that they can win a ransom for them. The tough Bancroft bravely opposes them, but she can make no headway by those means. Instead, the leader of the bandits demands sex. In this way, she is able to influence the way the women are treated (especially concerning the birth). The main conflict of the film is between Leighton and Bancroft. It's very 60s, with the progressive, liberated woman fighting against the strict, sexless one. The role of religion is very interesting in the film. It's shocking that Ford, a devout Catholic, would make the headmistress so foolish. It's a very intelligent criticism of the holier-than-thou attitude of some. When death looks imminent, Leighton seems almost excited to become a martyr; and she's willing and ready to take everyone else with her. When Bancroft sees her chance to save the others, Leighton viciously attacks her for being the "whore of Babylon." The final scene is quite excellent. What a great way for the greatest director of all time end his career.

...what a moving last picture for Ford's swansong.Too often underrated ,"Seven woman" in spite of a sometimes weak script-too many things happen in too little time- is perhaps the most modern film in Ford 's canon.

We find one of Ford's permanent features:a group of human beings in jeopardy who's got to struggle against an enemy:"Stagecoach" is the best example .Dudley Nichols's screenplay was inspired by Guy de Maupasssant's "Boule de Suif".

Women always played a prominent part in Ford's canon.Ford's world is deceptive :it seems to be a male world but actually women are the strongest and the wisest (Jane Darwell's character in "Wagon Master" ,the soldiers' wives in "Fort Appache" ).It was only natural that Ford's last movie was an all-women film (all men,including Albert's character are caricatures.) And these women are very endearing.Anne Bancroft,one of the greatest actresses America ever had, shines all along the movie ,and even when the script verges on grotesque ,she's still beaming, fascinating ,never losing her sense of humor.Even when she "becomes Chinese" ,nobody would think of laughing at her.She's so strong an actress that we seem to know her heroine intimately,her life in NYC people dispensaries,her sad love stories.With her masculine swagger,her boots ,her cigarettes and her whiskey we see a broken woman who has lost all her illusions.She's an atheist,which is very rare in Ford's canon.

Religion is in the center of many a Ford movie ."Seven Women" takes place in a mission .All these women put their faith in God and ...in America (We're American citizens!).One of them (Margaret Leighton) is particularly interesting : a tight-lipped puritan at the beginning of the movie,she becomes,slowly but inexorably ,a mystic lunatic,mentioning Babylon and sinners.Like "Stagecoach" ,"seven femmes " borrows from Maupassant.Like his heroine,"Boule De suif" Cartwright gives her life in sacrifice so the others can survive.

Six Woman are leaving Sodom under an ominous sky :one of them is screaming about lust while the blonde schoolteacher (Sue Lyon,whose role is an equivalent of Caroll Baker's in "Cheyenne Autumn ,though it's an underwritten part ),along with the newborn child, represents hope for the future:all that she went through ,her late heroine (she was the only one to be nice with Cartwright when she arrived)might help her to carry on.But Ford's last opus,like Huston's "the dead" is a very pessimistic opus.