High Noon and The Ballad of Little Jo

High Noon has two female roles, Helen and Amy, which is unlike the Westerns we have viewed before. Rarely have we seen a single woman in a Western with a strong role (other than Rooster Cogburn) but both Helen and Amy are important characters. Helen Ramirez, is a Mexican business woman, and is also confident and independent. A woman owning a business is an extreme revisionist aspect of the movie because it shows her independence and capabilities. Amy, Will Kane’s wife, shows a strong, stubborn personality when she refuses to stay in town as her husband had asked. Kane wants Amy to stay with him, because he does not want to be a coward and leave town but she is reluctant to do so. She stands her ground and waits in the train station to leave her husband until the very end of the film. Tomkins explains that guns solve problems and “out here a man settles his own problems” (Tompkins, 896). Amy explains in the movie that she hates guns but, at the end of the movie, Amy shoots one of the gunmen which differentiates this movie from previous Westerns. Amy sees the trouble, and conforms to the way men work to save Will Kane. Amy becomes somewhat of a savior to the alpha cowboy because he could not win the fight without her help which is completely different than previous Westerns. The independence of the woman, and her necessity to the alpha male cowboy, completely change the look and personality of the alpha male cowboy.

From the start of The Ballad of Little Jo, when Josephine Monaghan is about to be captured by the two soldiers on horses, she immediately defends herself by hitting and pushing down the man who she was traveling with. She then continues to put up a fight by out running and escaping the two soldiers on horses, which was shocking because she was a woman. Previously we have only seen the hardships of the alpha male cowboy traveling alone through the West, but The Ballad of Little Jo shows the hardship of a women traveling through the West, which had previously seemed impossible. Regularly the woman is portrayed as a servant type for the alpha male cowboy, cooking and cleaning for him, but there is a complete role reversal in this movie. Not only is Josephine acting as the male, but she hires a Chinese male to be her servant and he cooks her meals, and she even scolds him for not putting pepper on her meal. This shows that the alpha cowboy does not necessarily have to be a male but the female gender can fulfill the same duties as though she were a man. The only aspect of the woman that she maintains through the movie is her emotions, and yet she can still successfully accomplish the same situations as previous alpha male cowboys. Josephine/Little Jo is just as masculine as most alpha males we have come across, but when by herself or acting as a women, she uses language as though she were a feminine woman. “For the men who are the Western’s heroes don’t have the large vocabularies an expensive education can buy” (Tompkins, 51). This quote talks about men as the hero, and explains a main difference between Little Jo and a typical Western hero, because she maintains her level of language.