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THE_Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford has been touted as a 'revisionist' Western, continuing the trend of bringing modern sensibilities to bear on old familiar tales.
One of the defining characteristics of this so-called revisionism is the belated recognition that there were people in the old West other than white men squinting into the sunlight while shooting white men dressed in red body make-up and feathers.
Armed with new historical insight and sensitivity, filmmakers have begun to acknowledge that the Wild West was also populated by noble ex-slaves and patient wives who spent their days wiping their hands on aprons while squinting into the sunlight.
The Assassination of Jesse James, which lasts for two hours and 40 minutes, has no African Americans that I can recall (despite the fact that James's virulent racism seems to have motivated some of his criminality) and gives its two white women approximately 20 words and five minutes of screen time between them.
Before the apoplectic letters start rolling in, explaining that Westerns have always been about men and that women should damn well relax and enjoy their marginalisation, let's take a whistle-stop tour of the Western.
The book usually credited with 'inventing' the modern western is Owen Wister's 1902 novel, The Virginian, about a commitment-phobic cowboy falling in love with and marrying a schoolteacher from Vermont.
The Virginian, in turn, derived from the nation's frontier myths, all of which featured female protagonists and many of which were written by women. (These would reach their pinnacle with the Little House on the Prairie books, possibly the most popular Westerns of all time.)
Then came the immensely popular dime novels, which sensationalised the exploits of real people and invented modern celebrity. They didn't just make Jesse James and Buffalo Bill into stars, they also made Belle Starr into a star.
The very first dime novel, Malaeska, Indian Wife of the White Hunter, sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the 1860s and was written by a woman. And, let's not forget Calamity Jane, the cross-dressing, tough-talking, sharp-shooting heroine of many a dime novel and a completely berserk film starring Doris Day.
In all of the great cinematic westerns, female characters are paramount. My Darling Clementine hinges on Wyatt Earp's darling Clementine and High Noon hinges on Grace Kelly's pacifist Quaker bride, who spends most of the film in her wedding dress and proves braver than most of the townspeople.
And now, to bring us firmly into the modern age, The Assassination of Jesse James finds the women in James's life - his terrifying mother Zerelda, and his wife, who was her niece and his first cousin, also called Zerelda, none of which the film even bothers to mention - entirely negligible.
As his wife, Mary-Louise Parker spends her three minutes of screen time wiping her hands on her apron. Oh yes, and she screams when her husband is shot. If that's what passes for revisionism these days, I'll take the quaint, obsolescent stories in which the women actually get to speak, and it's the men who are silent.
l Editor's note: Sarah Churchwell is a senior university lecturer in American literature and culture.
