In the “Random Film of the Day” slot came up 7 Women (1965/1966)—and its oddity grabbed me at once: the final film by director John Ford, the godfather of the Western, maker of Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Quiet Man, is not a farewell to the Wild West but a drama about seven women in a besieged mission on the border of China and Mongolia. He is, in effect, making a Western here too—siege, horde, sacrifice—but with the polarity inverted: instead of John Wayne, there is a woman in cowboy trousers, buying the others’ freedom at the price of her own body and life.
Ford ended his career with a film his contemporaries trashed and forgot, only for it to be called, half a century later, one of the greatest farewells in film history. Worth figuring out what is going on there.
Formally, Ford had the perfect setup for a finale: four-time Oscar winner, 53 years in the business—from silent shorts of the 1910s to Cheyenne Autumn. Everything he knew how to do—a group of loners in isolation, a hostile environment, self-sacrifice—is present in 7 Women in nearly distilled form. But the genre frame is turned upside down.
A mission in northern China, 1935. All its white residents are women, plus one teacher, Charles Pether, whose pregnant wife Florrie is about to give birth. The mission awaits its new doctor with hope and gets a woman from Chicago instead: she smokes, drinks, swears, wears trousers and her hair cropped short, does not believe in God, and takes no part in the grace before meals. Dr. Cartwright, played by Anne Bancroft, is a character who is, quite literally, Wayne—and Slant’s critic notes that her cowboy costume makes her look like one of Ford’s regular actors.
First comes the plague. Refugees from a burned-out British mission bring cholera, and Cartwright takes command: burns their belongings, vaccinates everyone. The mission’s head, Agatha Andrews (Margaret Leighton)—strict, obsessed with control, with a repressed attraction to young Emma—sees the doctor as a threat, and she is not wrong. That does not stop Cartwright from saving other people’s lives.
Then comes the horde. Mongol chieftain Tunga Khan (former wrestler Mike Mazurki) burns down the neighboring mission, the Chinese garrison abandons its post, and his riders take the mission. Tunga Khan executes all the mission’s Chinese staff; the seven white women are herded into a shed. All along, Andrews keeps repeating: they will not touch us, we are Americans. Of course they will.
The resolution is Ford’s most radical gesture. Cartwright bargains: her medical bag for Florrie’s delivery in exchange for sexual submission to the chieftain. She delivers the baby—a boy is born—and goes to honor the bargain: becoming his concubine, she negotiates the other women’s freedom from within that status. Andrews, whose pathological revulsion toward sex becomes clinical by the finale, shrieks about the “Whore of Babylon.” The others understand the sacrifice. In the end, Cartwright, dressed in silk finery, offers Tunga Khan a poisoned cup: “So long, ya bastard”—then drinks from the second cup herself.
The crucial detail: Cartwright consciously does not belong to the seven of the title. She is an androgynous, painfully blunt “agent of change,” standing between the female world of the mission and the male world of the horde. Ford denies her the status of one of the seven heroines because she alone acts by her own choice rather than by her role. And that is precisely why the film’s ending and his own departure from cinema coincide: “So long, ya bastard”—the finest epitaph for a career that never spared itself.
But the main drama happened offscreen. Ford wanted Katharine Hepburn for Cartwright, considered Jennifer Jones, while Rosalind Russell lobbied for the role—but MGM cast Patricia Neal. Filming began on February 8, 1965, on the MGM lot. On the third day, Neal suffered a stroke—followed by three ruptured aneurysms and three weeks in a coma; Variety, having assumed the actress was dead, managed to publish an obituary. She was pregnant all that time—several months later, her healthy daughter Lucy was born. Neal survived in large part thanks to a group of volunteers led by her husband, the writer Roald Dahl: they devised an exhausting rehabilitation therapy that changed the treatment of stroke patients for decades to come.
Production stopped, and Anne Bancroft was urgently brought in as the doctor. Ford was displeased—he called her “Miss Monotone”—but in the end, her performance was precisely what carried the picture even in the most devastating reviews.
Ford’s legendary tyranny on set played out here too—but in reverse. By Anna Lee’s recollection, evidently understanding that this was his final film, he was “absolutely charming to everybody”: tea at 4:30 with cake, not a single raised voice throughout the shoot. The one explosion came when Flora Robson demanded that the title “Dame” be put on her dressing-room door, and received such a dose of destruction that Lee described it as “they literally cut her to pieces.” The shooting was done entirely on soundstages—Ford’s health would not allow him to travel to China—and that may have helped the film: the whole story looks like an intimate, almost theatrical diorama.
Between the director’s chairs and the dressing rooms, producer Bernard Smith brought the actors fresh script pages; Ford would ostentatiously throw them on the floor and announce improvisation. A comparison of the script with the footage shows that there was almost no real improvisation—apart from, for instance, Bancroft’s final line. Ford was playing a role, and that role was farewell.
A separate story is Woody Strode, one of Ford’s regular actors, who was given the role of a Mongol warrior in the film: the makeup artists stretched rubber over his eyes, glued on a braid, and the Chinese stunt performers on set assured him: “Woody, you look more Chinese than we do.” The racist makeup is, moreover, a genuinely vulnerable point in the film: Slant writes directly of the “racial impulse” in its portrayal of the Mongols, and the defense of “theatrical distance” remains debatable. But it was on this shoot that Richard Brooks offered Strode a role in The Professionals, finally giving him a place in the star billing. So Ford’s last film gave other careers a nudge.
The premieres—January 1966 in Los Angeles, May in New York. At the box office, the film was consigned to the fate of the second half of a double bill with The Money Trap, starring Elke Sommer. Critics were kind only to Bancroft’s performance: the NYT praised her “juicy, earthbound work” while admitting that the film “degenerates into a naked melodrama of female hysteria,” and the LA Times delivered its verdict: “it simply does not add up to anything convincing.”
The $2.3 million budget was not recouped. Ford was hurt: “I think it is one of my best pictures, but the public didn’t like it. It wasn’t what they wanted.” And, by a twist of fate, the flop proved fatal for him: according to biographer Joseph McBride, after 7 Women, Ford was never able to secure financing for any of his planned projects. The last word in his filmography is not “The End,” but a poisoned toast.
What followed was the classic story of belated recognition. Andrew Sarris named 7 Women the third-best film of 1966 (after Blow-Up and Gertrud), Cahiers du cinéma the sixth. The film appeared on several 1977 lists of “the most underrated American films of all time” and on Slant’s list of the “100 Essential Films.” On Rotten Tomatoes it has 83% from a small number of reviews—the kind of case where the ratings were given by people who actually watched it.
Richard Brody, writing in The New Yorker in 2013, framed it this way: final films are a genre of their own, like Bergman’s Saraband or Dreyer’s Gertrud—and 7 Women is, in that company, “one of the greatest films of all time.” Then, in 2025, Warner Archive released the film on Blu-ray from a 4K scan of the original negative—the first home release since the 1992 LaserDisc. For half a century, the film the studio buried beneath The Money Trap waited to be dug up.
7 Women is worth watching not as Ford’s best film, but as his most honest signature. Everything he loved—community, ritual, self-sacrifice, another person’s faith—is compressed here into one mission, one horde, and one woman who takes sin upon herself to save the rest. A Western turned inside out into a woman’s story, where the only one who shoots and dies is the one who gives herself away.
Cartwright is not one of the seven heroines. She is the eighth, breaking out of the list, because Ford never counted among heroes those who merely wait to be saved (judging by the plot, Andrews waited for someone to die for her). Her place in history was secured not by the seven whose freedom she bought, but by that final line—a toast addressed to cinema as a whole.
Cinema has perhaps known no harsher farewell to Ford: the final film by a master of the genre is about how a woman’s sacrifice is often dirtier than a man’s—and how that is exactly why it is stronger.