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Popular Culture Review
The Plainsman echoes all these themes. The show begins with
Abraham Lincoln mulling over the plight of returning Civil War soldiers.
Knowing that United States industry could not absorb them all, he wanted to
“attract our band of disbanded soldiers to the hidden wealth of our mountain
ranges.”^^ The villain in the film is a crooked businessman—^the likes of whom
many thought caused the Great Depression. The story line about fear of
someone selling guns to the Indians might parallel concerns about selling guns
to the Nazis or other European nations.
The social expectations of women in the film are consistent with the
expectations of American women in the 1930s. Calamity works at jobs typically
done by men - such as returning Civil War soldiers or, to American audiences,
unemployed husbands. Her promiscuous behavior and her proclivity for lying to
save things dear to herself made her unsuitable as a wife. Her plight is
unresolved in the end. She still works, but she loses her love object (Hickok) and
the respect of her peers (Cody, Custer). This film succeeds in its effort to
suppress independence in women.
Calaniity Jane
Calamity Jane starring Doris Day addressed suburban America during
the 1950s. For women, the fifties usually represent a conservative backlash to
the fi*eedom and economic gain they experienced during World War n. Many
scholars have questioned this scenario, though. The books and films popular
during the fifties were full of contradictory messages. James Baldwin’s novel.
Go Tell it on the Mountain, dealt with a young Afiican American fi*om Harlem
struggling with his religion, his family, and his homosexuality. Hugh Heftier’s
Playboy magazine encouraged men to remain single and sexually active.
Popular films of 1953 included establishmentarian classics such as From Here
to Eternity and The Robe, but other films revealed severe discomfort with
popular constraints. Frank Ross’s Roman Holiday, starring Audrey Hepburn,
challenged norms about feminine propriety by showing a princess on a binge
holiday with a newspaper reporter, whom she “marries” for one night. In Lili,
Leslie Caron plays an adolescent orphan who falls in love first with a circus
magician and then with a deranged puppeteer with some serious sexual identity
issues.
Calamity Jane presents several instances of deviant sexual behavior
and alternative family structures.^^ Set in Deadwood, South Dakota - an almost
all-male community. It includes several examples of cross-dressing and features
a marriage-like relationship between two independent and self-supporting
women. In the end, the women sacrifice their independence and marry men. The
film never condemns or punishes their prior experiment or the lifestyles of
several apparent homosexuals in Deadwood. The popularity of this film attests
that mainstream Americans were more broad-minded than many people think
they were.