7 Women

CinemaSerf

This is quite a curious swan-song for John Ford. An almost all-woman cast led by Anne Bancroft and Margaret Leighton are stranded in a remote missionary. When the local army battalion abandon their posts, a gang of marauding warriors take over their home and at some considerable risk to themselves, they must try and survive the encounter - and a cholera outbreak too. To be honest, not a lot goes on and the character depicted by Bancroft - a confident, self-reliant doctor, is oddly out of place for the scenario; especially when placed with the rather timid, puritanical, Leighton and a really under-used Flora Robson as "Miss Binns", and the ending is all just a bit too sudden.