The Western has taken many forms, from singing cowboys to Italian epics. But The Ballad of Little Jo is the first gender-bender, feminist horse opera. If nothing else, director Maggie Greenwald has scored a footnote in the history book.
She's done much more than that, though. The Ballad of Little Jo was inspired by a real woman, Josephine Monaghan, a cowboy whose gender wasn't discovered until after her death. Much of the film attempts to recreate the harsh realities of life in the West that explain why a woman would find it preferable to pose as a man.
In The Ballad of Little Jo, Monaghan has barely arrived out West before a decrepit peddler tries to sell her as a sex slave. It doesn't take long before Josephine discovers that in the West, a woman is either a wife or a whore. Since she doesn't want either role, she quickly cuts off her hair, pulls on some trousers and passes for one of the boys. She even starts wearing her six-shooter in the crotch position favored by gunfighters. Symbolism, anyone?
Even as a man, Little Jo has to contend with a brutish society ruled by whichever man in the bar is least drunk. The Ballad of Little Jo takes a mud-in-your-eye view of the West that's grim, but also reasonably accurate.
The movie's only real problem is its slow pace. Despite its leisurely attitude, however, its gritty tale punches some solid holes in genre conventions.
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