The West forms a basic imaginative landscape for Americans. Regardless of its reality, the West is home for much of our legendary material, home for characters either larger than life or somehow outside the boundaries of real life. Out there, where the established borders and communities of the growing United States meet the wilderness, is the place that Americans (of European descent) chose for many years to imagine their conflicts with the land, its animals, and its original people. Out there is the setting for those questions about race, the value of civilization, and the use of land that still remain unresolved all these years after the West has largely disappeared.1I In this essay, I am interested in how John Ford imagined the role of women in two movies--Stagecoach (1939) and The Searchers (1956)-that seem characteristic of his work. Ford is an important and popular film maker, perhaps the best American commercial director, and for many people his name is synonymous with the movie western.2 He both understood the western genre in its orthodox forms and, in his later works, reshaped the myth of the American West in a number of ways. Looking at the women characters in Stagecoach and The Searchers will certainly show us something of the roles, actions, and behaviors attributed to women in movie westerns. But we too often divorce movies from themselves as cinema, treating characters as if they existed merely in a formless sociology. John Ford is a director of unusual visual power, and his characters have cinematic as well as narrative power. In this essay, beyond the simple identifications of women's roles, I hope we will be able to see that women as visual elements in cinematic creations are given expressly cinematic attributes. Stagecoach is a film about the complex connection between the fringe society of the western towns and the open, beautiful, and often dangerous wilderness. The images of town life and townspeople show characters cramped in oppressive spaces. Ford was an early film maker to use ceilings in his images-just one of Stagecoach's influences on Citizen Kane-and the ceilings in the movie bear down upon the characters. Life for town dwellers is limited. Rooms are small for the number of people in them, and the few windows let in too little light-filtering into spaces in constricted beams. By contrast, the wilderness has open visual panoramas, full light, and room to move about. Travel through the open space, though, frightens the whites. When they leave town, their cramped stagecoach mimics the town itself: the travelers squeeze themselves into a small space, isolated from the outside. Indians, of course-as spirits of the wild and therefore enemies of whites-do not suffer these conditions. Unlike whites, they find security in the natural features of the land. They accept full light and open space. The major chase sequence late in the film shows Indians on galloping horses riding outside in pursuit of a small group of whites packed into the small box of the stagecoach. Between these two visually distinct groups stands the hero, The Ringo Kid (John Wayne). He enters the film in a remarkably dramatic visual sequence. From a shot of the interior of the stagecoach the film cuts abruptly to one that moves forward rapidly up to Wayne. He stands with rifle extended from his side (our left), his hat comfortably back on his head, and Monument Valley (where Ford shot many of his westerns) spread out behind him. The film identifies Wayne with the wilderness throughout-even