DB7

As the subject was action/adventures, clearly the change has been that with film's like Tomb Raider and Alien women are now more than just a love interest or heroines in need of rescue.

Steve Crook

Are there any other action/adventure films with female lead as powerful as Ripley?

Lara Croft in Tomb Raider is still just a sexual fantasy figure created by the makers of the video game. They just couldn't extend Angelina Jolie's breasts as much as they do Lara's :

Steve

DB7

Uma Thurman in Kill Bill?

penfold

Virginia McKenna as Violette Szabo in (the true story-based) Carve Her Name with Pride (1958)...??

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

Steve Crook

Great film, but I'd categorise that more as a bio-pic rather than an action/adventure which are usually fictional.

Violette herself was a most unusual woman, especially for the times.

Steve

Steve Crook

OK, I'll give you that one.
But my point was that strong female leads in action/adventure films are quite rare. They are usually there either as the hero's girl-friend and/or the person to be rescued.

There are very few with a female lead, and even fewer if we exclude all those based on cartoon characters or computer games.

Steve

DB7

I wouldn't disagree. A vengeful film like Kill Bill has actually rekindled my memories, and not good ones, of a British film with murderous female lead - Michael Winner's Dirty Weekend.... Despite his probable intentions of creating a female vigilante film along the lines of Death Wish it comes across as cheap and exploitive.

One of my favourite early strong female roles is Googie Withers in Pink String... maybe that is was co-written by Diana Morgan (with Hamer) allows me a smidgeon of sympathy for her character.

Steve Crook

If you go back in time there are other films with a strong female lead, like Black Narcissus, I Know Where I'm Going!, Wicked Lady etc. But I wouldn't really call those action/adventure films. I think the action/adventure genre, as it is usually considered today, really only started with films like Die Hard. The sort of films where there is no real plot, just lots of special effects (usually explosions with lots of flames). There are no real characterisations, just the hero, the hero's girlfriend and the villain are defined in slightly more than 2 dimensions. Everyone else is just there to be shot or blown up.

Not a genre I'm a fan of, but a very profitable one for the film-makers, so they keep on making them.

Steve

penfold

Not the lead role, but you wouldn't want to mess with Judi Dench's 'M' in the last few Bond movies....

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

Wolfgang

I am not sure their image has been progressive, they still conform to sexual stereotyping. I think this change reflects solely what man finds attractive. Now we get feisty action girls rather than damsel in distress, and maybe woman will find this representation more acceptable to her sensibilities but it is still representation that is shaped by man's perception, and what he finds sexually appealing. Tarantino does not strike me as some liberal thinking feminist, and The Bride is more likely to come straight out of his sexual fantasies. Similarly with Pussy Galore - her lesbianism is not some form of emancipation but because Ian Fleming gets turned on by being able to seduce lesbians. Catherine Tramell, arguably cinema's most liberated female character is only liberated because Paul Verhoeven gets off on it. Woman in film is primarily still under control of man, and I think that ultimate use of your power over someone is to set them free - it implicitly acknowledges you are their master. Therefore I think female liberation is actually all about male empowerment.

WiseFilms

Rejoice! My ISP connection failed again and deleted my very lengthy, multilayered, profound,etc. assessment of women's use and reflection in the action/adventure genre, past & present, and now no one can read it!

I will say in brief synopsis -if I can- I assented the mentioning of Sigourney Weaver in 'Alien' ,as a sort of cornerstone of the modern usage of Kick-butt chicks as counter-point the stock D.I.D. who never picks up a gun or heavy object to defend her man from perils.
Perhaps I'm being influenced by the Edith Piaf boxed-set I'm listening to now, but I made particular mention of the French Resistance Heroines like like Lucie Aubrac (real, and played by Carole Bouchet in the 1997 film) and Charlotte Gray (fiction, played by Cate Blanchett in 2001).
There's a special reverence for the psychological depths of rebellion in women, in the spy and war movies, away from the paradigmatic Patriarchy of the typical modern action films ( whether their women are passive broads or femme-Bruce Willis's):
Noteworthy , above even some Garbo and Dietrich roles, and Virginia McKenna in 'Carve Her Name with Pride' , I think Simone Simon (although she said she felt nothing for the character herself!) in 'Mademoiselle Fifi' is very fine. And Diane Keaton in 'The Little Drummer Girl' is by far the most underappreciated Le Carre adaptation.
The revenge and fantasy women are fantasy and represent I suppose nothing but laziness and distraction from reality, on the part of their producers and audience.
'Tank Girl' has as much say about Empowering Feminism that 'Kill Bill' does=nothing.
It's arresting in it's extremes , in context to the genre as a whole...
And as ill advised to think of it as the neccisary significant step's forward in our society, as it is to call 'The Matrix' mind-expanding or revolutionary.
It's easy to expound on the rhetoric , of an ALL AGES biowaste product of our times like the Disney cartoon 'Mulan'..so politically correct! So accessible! -So soul-deadeningly smug, I say.
I know some "liberal' parents who will let there daughter watch Socially Redeeming tripe like that, but refuse to allow 'The Little Mermaid' because it's "patriarchal"to them.
To allow the artform to dry up because it doesn't in every way correspond to our pre-digested idea's of what's right, is to murder true liberalism and choice.

Action plots are rarely motivated by the desires of women, only slightly altered at best. And in a movie like 'The Hidden Fortress', we can observe how much more effective the ways of subversion were, in the 1950's, than they are today. Akira Kurosawai's character of the princess (motivation, George Lukas claims, for his dull one played by Natalie Portman) in this 1958 classic, is played "feistily" by Misa Uehara, yet with such subtlety and intelligence as to be foreign in every way to the Western film-goer weaned on 'Lara Croft' fantasies.

I'd resisted in in my first, longer, more focused draft of reply to this question...
But here it is: a movie by a woman (Katherine Bigalow) about a female cop (played by Halloween's Jamie Lee Curtis): 'Blue Steel'. Big deal it made in some circles. The same types who were impressed by 'Thelma and Louise' I gather.
I much preferred Laura Dern's detective in Clint (that big mean misogynist !) Eastwood's 'A Perfect World'. Even when I was 13 when I saw it, the scene where she punches and knees an overzealous sharpshooter, was a more genuine feminist zap than all the Thelma's & Louise's put together.

I just watched Gerd Oswald/ Jo Eisenger's 'Crime of Passion' again, and have to say that the melodrama, is a way that serves women much better than action-adventure.
Look at Sigourney in 'A Map of the World' after you see 'Alien'. It might not get the men off (it was a total box office dud here), and she doesn't kill to save anyone, but you'll see who the real Strong Woman is.

ChristineCB

What about Michelle Yeoh in CROUCHING TIGER?

And while Pierce wasn't sitting in HER lap, Michelle came as close as anyone I can remember since Ginger Rogers for her "doing everything Fred did except backwards and in high-heels" (thanks to the late great Ann Richards).

Steve Crook

Oh there's no doubt (here) that the women are really in charge. They just let us men think that we're in charge when it suits them :

But the OP did ask about the action/adventure type of films.

You mention Crouching Tiger Christine. There do tend to be more fighting women in recent action movies from Asia than from America.

Steve

penfold

Talking of Natalie Portman; Leon. Cracking film.

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

hippyd100

Hi!

For my media studies A Level I am studying women in film, and my exam question is "To what extent have the roles of actress in film changed over the past 70 years?" And I will probably focus on two main actresses, one modern and one from about 50 years ago.
Does anyone have any information that could help me?

I would be grateful of ANY help!

Thanks