Wild Women - Calamity Jane, Belle Star, Annie Oakley [VHS]

Wild Women - Calamity Jane, Belle Star, Annie Oakley [VHS]

Wild Women - Calamity Jane, Belle Star, Annie Oakley [VHS]
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Category: VHS Video
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Product details

Actor: Real West
Edition: VHS Tape
Format: Black & White, Color, NTSC
Release Date: 2001-01-23
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Publisher: A & E Home Video
Studio: A & E Home Video

VHS Movie Reviews of Wild Women - Calamity Jane, Belle Star, Annie Oakley [VHS]

Movie Review: Needed more information about the other women of the west
Summary: 4 Stars

In some ways, this video emphasizes the dramatic at the expense of the reality. The lives of the three most famous women commonly associated with the west, Belle Star, Calamity Jane and Annie Oakley are examined. However, the exploits of Calamity Jane are mostly fiction, Belle Star was more the wife of an outlaw than an outlaw and Annie Oakley grew up in Ohio and never lived in the west. Therefore, that part of the video was of interest, but not significantly so. It appeared that their names were included to make the tape attractive, even though they really were not all that wild.
The main point of interest and the part that should have received more emphasis was the role of women in opening the west. By necessity, women on the frontier were treated with a great deal of equality. They were entrepreneurs, managers and generally considered full citizens when such things were unheard of in the "civilized" lands. Women were able to vote in many western territories decades before the constitutional amendment granting them the right was passed. One fact that I was not aware of was that many of the women who moved west were educated, which refutes the notion that they were all simple folk who went where their husbands told them to go. It is certain that there are many true stories of such women doing without fanfare all of the exploits attributed to the three stars of the tape.
This video is worth watching, not because the lives of the three headliners are all that exciting, but because it shows how so many other women worked alongside men as equals to turn the frontier into a home. They were not wild, but instruments that molded the west into a community of transplanted European civilization.

Summary of Wild Women - Calamity Jane, Belle Star, Annie Oakley [VHS]

Join host Kenny Rogers as the myths, legends and realities of one of our most fabled eras come to life through authentic diaries, period accounts, rare photos and footage and expert commentary in THE REAL WEST. Belle Star was a robber and a horse thief. Annie Oakley could shoot a cigarette out of your mouth at fifty paces. Calamity Jane was as tough as beef jerky on a three-day ride. The wild women of the Old West weren't prissy little frontier fillies. They staked their claim to Western legend with a style all their own. Problem is, history leans to the male gunslingers and Indian fighters. In WILD WOMEN, America's folklore heroines get their just rewards.
"The women of the West were the very best America had to offer," opines one of the historians in this documentary chronicling the distaff pioneers of America's frontier. After this claim is easily proven with a brief recount of the particular hardships faced by female settlers, movingly illustrated by photographs and excerpts from the women's letters, it's perhaps regrettable that the rest of this hour-long film is content to salute three famous Western women who made their fame by striving to hang out with the boys. Or at least having been thought to; the notorious exploits of bandit Belle Star turn out to have been merely the slanderous imaginings of a novelist out to make a profit off a woman whose only crime was marrying and befriending a series of criminals, though she herself kept struggling to raise herself and her children out of poverty and into a respectable life. The film also makes abundantly clear how much and how consciously "Little Sure Shot" Annie Oakley used her fame toward feminist ends, even in her encouragement of ladies to take up target practice. But after starting with an appreciation for the mostly ignored bravery and fortitude of the many anonymous women who made the hard journey west, it's a little hard not to see some of the more rip-roaring exploits as just more of the same old story, dressed up in skirts. "I was at all times with the men when there was adventure and excitement to be had," Calamity Jane is quoted; a decision that led to a life no more admirable or courageous than those who walked hundreds of miles beside the covered wagon, kept home for their fortune-seeking husbands, grieved when they buried their children, and then soldiered on. --Bruce Reid

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