Painted Angels

Makes "Unforgiven" look like "Oklahoma"- horribly real. Fricker is like Thatcher - the only heroes in the end are the survivors - rings true don't you think? Feels like history instead of John Wayne. Pity the whole story isn't there.

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".

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.

I think this movie was EXTREMELY slow and boring, It might be because there was no music in the backround.