Distinctly Montana Magazine

76 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • FA L L 2 0 2 4 T HE STORYTELLING TRADITION of a woman crossdressing to get through life has a robustly wide field of operation. Think of Mulan (both in its original Chinese legend and Disney movie renditions), or Yentl (both the original story by Isaac Ba- shevis Singer and the Barbra Streisand musical adaptation), not to mention the heroines of multiple Shakespeare comedies. The nineteenth century American West makes sense for such a story; there may be a multitude of dangers both from nature and man, yet there is also the space, literally and figuratively, for self-cre- ation or re-invention. The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), written and directed by Maggie Greenwald, serves as a valuable example of this motif for Western cinema. Though modest in production scale and unwilling to indulge in expected genre beats, the movie manages to tell a story of survival against gendered obstacles that feels, 31 years down the road, like an icebreaker for other Westerns, such as Scott Frank's excellent miniseries Godless (2017) or Ana North's 2021 novel Outlawed. Viewers coming to Little Jo expecting rip-snorting ac- tion will be primed for disappointment; knowing you're in for a grit-flecked character study is more likely to result in a favorable impression. That the movie was filmed near Red Lodge, Mon- tana on the border of the Custer National Forest grants its gritti- ness an additional layer of Treasure State genuineness. The film begins with Josephine Monaghan (Suzy Amis) being cast out by her well-to-do East Coast family after giving birth to a child out of wedlock. The reality of how precarious a single wom- an's position is becomes distressingly clear after she narrowly es- capes assault by a traveling salesman on the road. Realizing that disguise is her best defense, she slashes her own face, cuts her hair, buys some men's duds from a general store, and becomes a young man named "Jo." She ends up at a hardscrabble min- ing town called Ruby City, where she makes the acquaintance of Percy Corcoran (Ian McKellen, in his first American film), a dis- placed Englishman who at first serves as a friendly companion to Jo before his deep well of vicious misogyny becomes chillingly apparent. Eventually Jo is hired to tend sheep on the land owned by Frank Badger (Bo Hopkins, who will be well known to fans of Sam Peckinpah movies), later saving enough money to buy a small spread of her own. She even finds loving connection with a man, Tinman Wong (David Chung), who knows the truth and accepts her as a woman. But as the years roll by, can her secret remain hidden from the rest of the world? The Ballad of Little Jo arrived right at the moment when the Western re-emerged after a protracted period of stagnation back into popular appeal. Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves (1990) and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992) both won the Best Pic- ture Academy Award for their respective years of release, in ad- dition to being commercially successful. Little Jo has far more in common with the latter; indeed, it would serve well as a com- panion piece to the Eastwood film in many ways. Both fall under the banner of "revisionist Westerns," those films which take an intentionally unglamourous, if not always strictly historically ac- curate, stance toward the genre (they were all the rage during the 1970s). Both frankly acknowledge gendered violence, though to different ends. The brutal knife attack in the whorehouse in the opening scenes of Unforgiven sets up the Eastwood character's The Ballad of Little Jo and Revisioning the West MONTANA MEDIA by KARI BOWLES

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