Translated from French by John Caughie and Norman King
Originally published in Cahiers du cinéma, n. 182, September 1966; translated in Theories of Authorship, edited by John Caughie (London and New York: Routledge, 1981), 117-120.
Narboni can be associated with Comolli not only as editor of Cahiers but also as representative of the magazine's development away from the politique, towards a more complex view of the author as a problematic figure, the site of contradictions and repressions. Seven Women had been an almost universal disappointment, even to critics sympathetic to Ford (the exception being Andrew Sarris, who defends it as a 'genuinely great film': The John Ford Movie Mystery, p. 184). Narboni's title is "La preuve par huit," a play on the expression la preuve par neuf ('casting out the nines'), a mathematical proof for checking multiplications by a process of adding together the sums of the various digits after eliminating all the nines. [John Caughie]
If we agree to count Miss Ling as one of the members of what used to be called the 'fair sex', whose number and presence provides John Ford's latest film with its title (and the fact that we are once again dealing with an outsider would seem to be a strong incentive for us to do that), we have to admit that these seven women in fact become eight. Namely: Agatha Andrews, the woman in charge of the mission, concealing beneath an armour of excessive piety a horrific combination of repressed sensuality and deeply felt vacuity; her shadow and ghost, the impalpable Miss Russell, smoky grey and got up later on, when rebellion and disrespect win her over, in a ridiculously oversized raincoat; Emma Clark, the young missionary, the object of every kind of tenderness, even the most perturbing; Flora Peter, making the mission vibrate with her continual screaming, in which the natural nervousness of the pregnant woman is in competition with the terrifying but thrilling prospect of being attacked by Mongol marauders; Dr. Cartwright (Anne Bancroft), tender, coarse, concealing her wounds, the archetype of the positive Fordian character; then two English women pursued by outlaws, Miss Bins and Jane Argent; lastly, Miss Ling.
Miss Ling is first of all the outsider, the absent one, everywhere a displaced person. Perhaps, we are told, a descendent of deposed Chinese princes, she accompanies the two English women as far as the mission. Silent, unseeing, isolated from the seven women, she waits. When Anne Bancroft says to Sue Lyon, 'You are the only one who can get away from here', the framing brings together the blond missionary and the impassive Chinese woman who is no more concerned or animated than a table or a plate. Then the Mongols arrive - and they are even more anti-Chinese than anti-American. Torn away from a group of which she wasn't really - or wasn't yet - a part, she is now subjected to all kinds of humiliation, demeaned, scoffed at, mauled, reduced to the position of slave and object.
One frequently finds, you may say, in Ford's films situations like this, in which two civilizations, two hostile, or at least foreign, racial universes are in conflict, interweave or interpenetrate: whites and Indians, Europeans and Polynesians, westerners and orientals. With, between the two, a whole interplay of exchanges, of difficult adoptions, of abductions and retrievals; a whole series of transfers and transitions, from exclusions to false recognitions, from treacherous reunions to repeated captures. Whites forced to become Indians, restored to their own civilization only to be rejected by the very people who sought their release (The Searchers, Two Rode Together); or the free choice and adoption of another world, of a new homeland (Donovan's Reef). It would be inviting, and much too easy, in that case, claiming to know Ford, to label Miss Ling as the classic type of the victim of racial ostracism, banished and despised. The diabolical structuring of the film, by declaring her 'out of play', makes it impossible to allocate to her the number Eight and thus to skirt round the problem.
It is simply that, at the opposite pole, and not at the fringes but within the group of women itself, there is Anne Bancroft, representing a second known type of undesirable, for moral rather than ethnic reasons this time; all the more disturbing for being obstinately present and active: an energetic, brutal, outspoken presence, forcibly injected into the lethargic universe of the mission. Unequivocal in her tone of voice, her conduct, her language, tolerated only because of her function, fomenting a feeling of unease, made still more intolerable by her being indispensable. Within the walls of the mission house, doubly isolated by its location and the epidemic, she wreaks salutary havoc, sows healthy devastation.
What is so fundamentally new in Seven Women, what gives this film which seems on the surface to be so calm its 'disturbing' power, its disequilibrium and its controlled instability, its incessant and unpredictable rebounds, is, then, the confrontation of two orders, two types of conflict and situation which are usually kept separate in Ford's other films. Not focusing on one or other character, but effecting between the outsider and the intruder a series of to-ings and fro-ings, of exchanges; passing from the moral to the social order, making them subtly interact and fuse, condemning the two women to the same fate. Being excluded from one group equals being solicited and integrated by the other. Substitution replaces addition; racial discrimination and puritanism reveal the same features of hatred and taboo. Chosen by Tunga Khan - and it is with diabolical skill that Ford gradually reveals that she has been chosen not as a doctor but first and foremost as a woman - seated at the chief's right hand during the circus games, when adorned in oriental costume, Miss - and no longer Dr. - Cartwright creates by her absence a lack in the group. Immediately Miss Ling is handed back. The number Seven is restored by interchangeability. The women are allowed to go free. Anne Bancroft poisons the Mongol and kills herself.
It is perhaps not an exaggeration, then, to see in this single unit, this one number too many, this superfluity that may be thought anodyne, this hardly perceptible surplus, the most developed and most dissimulated form of the excess Ford has always liked to use - and now more than ever - in order to pervert conformity and tranquility to the extent of destroying them. Thus it is astonishing to see how perplexed, not to say disappointed, some of the most resolute Fordians have been, seeing Seven Women as an aberration, an untypical film, contradicting, even, the mythology of its author. No doubt it is one of those works which are at once synthesis and crowning achievement, in which the absolute project of its author is located at the borderline between the excessive and the sublime. Yet all Ford is present, though in a tranquil immoderation. Even the story is not absolutely new: it is enough to cast your mind back to a television programme in which we were told of the misfortunes of two nuns confronted by Chinese bandits. Once again it is a group of people united by the hazards of a journey or condemned to stagnation. Prisoners of the desert or of the high seas,* a group of men or, for the first time, of women, it all comes to the same in the end. (Ford plays all the time, moreover, on sexual ambiguity: the natural status conferred on Anne Bancroft because of her profession, then her hyperfeminization; the schoolteacher mistaken for a preacher, like the whiskey drummer in Stagecoach; Margaret Leighton's ambivalent attraction toward Sue Lyon, etc.). Always the same enclosed cell, here unchangeable, ossified, fusty; an abandoned planet over which Margaret Leighton scurries with her curious walk, like a broken marionette, half scampering, half gliding; an artificial enclave, quite deliberately and pointedly designated as such by the set, swept by arbitrary, violent lighting and moonspots. And the outside, the hostile surroundings, oppressive, without clear features. In the muted opening shots, bristling with hostility and white-hot, an inhuman pattern of relationships reveals its unbearable intensity. A whole series of internal dilapidations is brought into play, the exacerbation of desires, of hates in successive scenes in which militant atheism and blasphemy become intertwined with frigid, repressed or flagrant sexuality. From surreptitious advances to brief moments of painful separation, from violent confrontations to restrained frenzy, the plot moves along towards the resolution of the threat, the materialization of the Enemy. Abstract, archetypal enough for us to be able to acquit Ford of the charge of racism: Arabs, outlaws, Indians, or Mongols, it is less the name attached to this enemy that interests him than the intervention of an external force of whatever kind which, as though secreted from the inside, seems, rather than compromising or interrupting, to bring to an almost salutary end the fraught coexistence of a group of individuals who have reached the extreme point of crisis in their confrontation. In the last scenes, finally, we see the culminating splendor of the great funeral ceremonies of the screen in which, from The Princess Yang Kwei Fei to Europa '51 and from Les Dames du bois de Boulogne to The Naked Kiss, sacrifice, shame, cruelty, and insanity (in this instance of the mise en scène) exchange their sparkling unction.
*Narboni is referring to The Searchers (French title La Prisonnière du désert) and The Long Voyage Home
