Throwback: ‘Bad Girls’ Was 1994’s Big Lady-Western Missed Opportunity

The logline is a doozy: after a brothel proprietress barely escapes the hangman’s noose, four prostitutes become outlaws in 1890s Colorado. That kind of movie would be met with raging expectation and enthusiasm today. Back in 1994, it was positively revolutionary. Or it would have been if it was any good. Bad Girls wasn’t very good, though, and it was a total flop at the box office. But its failure was a fascinating one, for the behind-the-scenes story of its original feminist intentions and for the quartet of actresses who starred in this snapshot of mid-’90s Hollywood missed opportunity.

With Bad Girls available to stream on Amazon Prime (free if you’ve got the Starz subscription), what better time than now to delve back into this film that has become completely forgotten (and not without justification). This isn’t so much a diamond in the rough as it is a diamond that never was. Still, if you’re looking for a movie where Madeline Stowe, Andie MacDowell, Drew Barrymore, and Mary Stuart Masterson ride horses and brandish pistols in a Wild West shootout, this is definitely the movie to watch.

Ten Things About the 1994 Western Bad Girls

1. The backstory on this one is bananas! Originally, director Tamra Davis — who at the time had directed the Chris Rock film CB4 and the Showtime movie Guncrazy starring Drew Barrymore, but would go on to direct Billy Madison and Crossroads — was going to direct from a script by Yolande Turner and Becky Johnston. The idea was an overtly feminist Western, written by women, directed by a woman, starring women. Instead the studio, 20th Century Fox, fired Davis after nine days of shooting, amid rumors that they wanted a sexy-lady version of something like Young Guns. The Western resurgence of the early ’90s was in full swing, with Unforgiven winning Oscars and Tombstone putting up good business. Kudos to a big studio like Fox for at least wanting to get women in on the action. But seeing what the end result turned out to be, the loss of vision after dropping Davis from the project is felt throughout the movie. Whatever vestiges of strong feminist statement remain, they all feel watered down and muddled. Ultimately, as a movie, it makes for a good poster.
2. Case in point: the film’s opening shot, a splash page of a newspaper declaring the triumph of feminist newspaper reporter Nellie Bly upon successfully circumnavigating the globe in 72 days, besting the benchmark of 80 days set by author Jules Verne. This page has nothing to do with the story of Bad Girls nor the specific characters involved, and is generally just a vague Feminism In These Here Times moment that it borders on laughable. No, strike that, it’s all the way laughable. 
3. Part of what makes the Nellie Bly Gambit even sillier is the fact that it’s accompanied by the absolute gauziest section of composer Jerry Goldsmith’s score. The legendary film composer has scored dozens of films, including quite a few Westerns, but Bad Girls is not among his finest. This particular score feels like it’s been flowered up for the wake of being a women’s picture; it all feels pretty gross.
4. So let’s dig into the cast, which is honestly 90% of the reason to watch this movie today. The sight of the the four principals — Madeline Stowe, Andie MacDowell, Drew Barrymore, and Mary Stuart Masterson — side-by-side on the poster with guns in their hands is pretty much a better statement than the movie itself. It’s an idea that far outpaces the film that resulted. Stowe would get top billing, which is interesting because three years later it would’ve almost certainly been Barrymore’s show (and three years earlier it might’ve been MacDowell’s or even Masterson’s). This was the prime of Stowe’s career, coming after Last of the Mohicans and Short Cuts but before 12 Monkeys. After that, it would be a decade and a half before Revenge brought her back into the mainstream consciousness. MacDowell was also riding a career high, having come off of Groundhog Day, Short Cuts, and Four Weddings and a Funeral. After this, Multiplicity and Michael lie ahead, but the 2000s basically crashed her career. That said, we’re in a bit of an Andie MacDowell renaissance right now, with Magic Mike XXL having given her such a good part to play. Mary Stuart Masterson’s career was already on its way down a steep decline, after Fried Green Tomatoes and Benny and Joon had gotten her ’90s off to such a good start. Really, only Drew Barrymore was about to embark upon a career upswing. She had only just emerged from her post-child-star rehab phase. This was the Poison Ivy/Amy Fisher era for Barrymore, where she was constantly playing sexed-up, precocious characters. She’s had several makeovers over the course of her wildly underrated career. 

5. The plot of Bad Girls gets set into motion with an INSANE quickness. In the first five minutes, Mary Stuart Masterson has thrown off the advances of a drunken lout (he paid for sex, but she categorically refuses to kiss), and Madeline Stowe has shot him dead. By minute six, Stowe’s being taken to the noose for hanging. Minute six! And that’s after a full minute was spent zooming out from the Nellie Bly newspaper shot. Before the ten-minute mark, all four women are on horseback and riding out of town as outlaws. This is an admirable swiftness of pace but it also gives us absolutely zero time to get to know the women or understand why they’d each risk their lives and livelihoods for one another. It’s just one more area where the film seems hacked at and fiddled with.
6. Once the women go on the run, the film takes the form of a fairly predictable and not all that remarkable Western. They go to withdraw money from Stowe’s secret bank account, but their cash is stolen by a handsome yet reckless bandit from Stowe’s past. MacDowell gets caught and jailed, though she falls in love with her jailer (James LeGros). They meet a baby-faced Dermot Mulroney, who turns out to be an ally. They go to reclaim Stowe’s money, Barrymore gets captured, Stowe gets pretty horrifically abused, Mulroney rescues Barrymore but then ends up captured and killed, and in the end, all four women band together and shoot the hell out of the whole gang of bandits and make their way west into the sunset. 

7. The acting in the film is … let’s say uneven? Stowe is pretty great, and if Bad Girls does anything, it reminds us that Hollywood didn’t do right by this woman. She should have had MANY more chances to show her stuff as a leading woman before the business packed her away and moved on to the next thing. Masterson is also solid, in a way that makes you miss her. Barrymore isn’t quite there yet, but we all know she ended up really growing into her career over the following years. MacDowell is … not good. She’s not always a bad actress, but she’s not always good, either, and this stiff, awkward performance falls into the latter camp for sure.
8. Also, not for nothing, but can we get a historian’s ruling on whether bottle blondes existed in 1890? 
9. When I say “baby-faced Dermot Mulroney,” know that I mean it. LOOK AT THIS LITTLE FACE: 

10. Is this a good movie? Again, no. But it’s an instructive movie. It’s the kind of movie that will make you long for the movie it might have been. A movie that might have gone in a more righteously heroic direction for the women. Or a more outrageously absurd one, for that matter. There’s a strange sense of humor peeking out from behind corners in this one that might’ve been fun if it had been more seriously indulged. In the end, Bad Girls is neither fish nor fowl, and it’s certainly not the feminist Western that Tamra Davis was reportedly set on making. In the end, we’re left gawking at the wan remains of what might have been. Gawking like this bank teller who gives the film’s most hilarious reaction shot: 

We didn’t deserve this, Bad Girls. Neither did you, though.

Stream Bad Girls on Prime Video