William A. Wellman · 1951 · overland

William Wellman's 1951 western, from a story by Frank Capra. A California rancher whose valley has no women goes to Chicago to recruit a hundred and forty of them for the two-thousand-mile trip out, on the understanding that they will marry men they have only seen in daguerreotypes. Most of the trail hands desert; the women drive the wagons themselves.

1. 1
   Chicago

   Roy Whitman recruits a hundred and forty women - a widow, a pregnant girl, two former showgirls - and each picks a husband from a tray of daguerreotypes before she has any idea what the journey will cost.

2. 2
   St. Joseph

   At the Missouri the Conestogas and fifteen trail hands are waiting, and the wagon master Buck Wyatt begins teaching women who have never handled a team to drive, shoot and mend a wheel.

3. 3
   The desert

   The hands desert, the water runs short and the deaths begin - and Wellman films the crossing without any of the consolations the genre usually offers, the women burying their own and going on.

4. 4
   Whitman's Valley

   What arrives in California is a fraction of what left Chicago. They stop short of the settlement to wash and change, so as to walk in properly - which is the film's one concession, and it earns it.