7 Women

Abandoned by MGM at the time of its release, and mostly relegated to the second half of double bills, Ford’s last feature is one of the great “final” films and a significant departure. Based on Norah Lofts’ story about a Christian mission on the China-Mongolia border in the 1930s during a time of murderous conflict, Ford’s deeply interior, proto-feminist, radical and reactionary treatment caps the last phase of his career and its conscious revisioning of the themes of gender, race, colonialism, and American exceptionalism and myth. Its remarkable multi-generational cast features Anne Bancroft, Margaret Leighton, Sue Lyon, Flora Robson, Eddie Albert and Woody Strode.