Bad Girls

Bad Girls

I think it’s a great idea to make a western about four tough women. And such a sad movie it is. “Bad Girls” is like “Young Guns” in drag, with nothing new except the quickly spent surprise of finding cowgirls instead of cowboys in this B-minus Western. There is no trace of invention in the plot. After “Silverado,” “Unforgiven,” and “Tombstone,” here’s an assembly line throwback.

Madeleine Stowe, Mary Stuart Masterson, Andie MacDowell and Drew Barrymore are wonderful together; they’re supported by male actors who somehow look as if they want to wipe their feet on the mat before walking into a scene as well they might; for these four have never been seen before. The women are dressed and made up like models in a Calvin Klein ad. (In an early scene requiring them to be smudged with dust, each one gets a smudge just where rouge would otherwise adorn their famous cheekbones.) At the beginning of the film, of course, the four women are prostitutes. (The only four professions available to women in the old west were Marriage, School-Marming, Prostitution and Old Biddyhood.)

After straight-shooting Stowe kills a drunken colonel who is molesting Masterson, a lynch mob prepares to hang her but her three friends help her escape, and they go on the lam pursued by a couple of Pinkerton detectives (Stowe gallops out of town on a horse while her hands are tied behind her, a trick Buffalo Bill would have paid her to turn).

The plot does not thicken exactly but it jells: we get the obligatory Ol’ Swimmin’ Hole scene in which all four women are modestly submerged to a depth just above their cleavage; then the obligatory handsome young cowboy (Dermot Mulroney) happens along and becomes smitten by Stowe; later while trying to withdraw her savings from a bank Stowe gets inadvertently involved in a bank robbery pulled by whiskery Kid Jarrett (Kid Russo), who takes her savings.

The rest of plot involves the women trying to get back money, trade hostages/rescue young cowboy etc., and could have been dictated at seance by shade of Hopalong Cassidy.

Women existed in the West, and some good movies were made about them. Three such films are “Cattle Annie And Little Britches,” “The Ballad Of Little Jo,” and “A Thousand Pieces Of Gold.” These flicks try to imagine what it was like for a woman who didn’t fit into narrow categories on the ignorant, intolerant frontier. (“Little Jo” concludes that an independent rancher would not be accepted as a woman and has its heroine disguise herself as a man.)

The hardships of life on the frontier do not seem to bother Cody, Anita, Eileen and Lilly. Although they occupy high positions in show business, these four bad girls have somehow learned to ride, shoot, use explosives and deliver a right cross. Life was not easy for a frontier prostitute; upstairs girls over saloons were treated like slaves, as the opening scenes of “Unforgiven” indicate.

To develop such outdoors skills these girls must have had weekends off. Even so, after a rattlesnake startles a team of horses (what originality!), one is forced to admit that it is amazing to see Drew Barrymore gallop on horseback after a runaway wagon, jump onto it and rein in the team.

Have these women been debased by all those years spending their days with drunken hairy smelly illiterate old coots? Hardly.

The dialogue makes passing acknowledgment of their relief at being free from such duties and moves on.

Nor do any of the men notice that with supermodel looks the girls could probably make much more in Chicago or Kansas City than in Echo City’s brothels.

“Bad Girls” fails all the more poignantly because right now the actresses are at their peaks and could have been energized by something more ambitious than this workmanlike production. Think Stowe in “Blink,” MacDowell in “Four Weddings And A Funeral,” Masterson in “Fried Green Tomatoes,” Barrymore in “Gun Crazy.” Better yet, see them there and consider how lame they look here.

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