Raquel Welch Served As The Prototype For Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft and Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow —Beautiful, Yes, But Never Submissive

The novella that is the source material for Frank Darabont’s beloved The Shawshank Redemption comes from Stephen King’s collection Different Seasons. It’s called “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” in reference to the first pinup poster that Andy Dufresne, the story’s hero, uses to hide the hole he’s digging in his prison cell’s wall. In the film, by the time he’s escaped and his ruse is discovered, the Rita Hayworth poster has been replaced with Raquel Welch in a two-piece fur bikini from Don Chaffey’s One Million Years B.C. (1966). It’s that poster the evil warden rips from the wall, and that image, shot between takes during a shoot in which Welch was informed in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t hired because of her acting ability and intelligence, that made her an international sensation before the film had even been released. A fascinating thread to worry among many in The Shawshank Redemption, is this subtle history of the bombshell/pin-up culture of Hollywood that was becoming unpopular during this period. Pushed into the persona of a sexpot, Welch was largely passed over for serious roles during the New American Cinema of the 1970s and left for her pigeonholing, undefended by the second wave of feminist thought.

I fantasized at the video store about that cover for One Million Years B.C., but my first experience with Raquel Welch was through her other 1966 film, Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage. She plays Cora Peterson, the technical assistant to a brilliant brain surgeon tasked with operating on a gravely injured Eastern Bloc physicist who has been gravely injured by a failed assassination attempt. The only recourse is to remove a blood clot from inside the body and so Cora and a team of specialists are shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the patient. As an “assistant” and the only female member of the team Welch injects a certain amount of steel into her performance. When she’s asked if she’s good in the kitchen, Cora responds that she’s very excited to be part of this dangerous mission and then fires a laser at her interrogator’s hand. “For a nice young lady, you play with the damnedest toys, Ms. Peterson,” he says. She says, “that’ll teach you where to keep your hand.” She shares almost every shot in the film with her male teammates. She’s an equal, undertaking dangerous extravehicular sorties, helping to solve the mystery of a saboteur, even figuring out in a key moment the way a damaged surgical laser could be repaired. If One Million Years B.C.’s cheesecake publicity machine hadn’t instantly branded her as a mindless object of onanistic desire, she would have had the career her Cora Peterson suggests she deserved: that of an action hero. 

Indeed, Welch is the prototype for Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider Lara Croft and Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow: beautiful women, certainly, but hardly the passive — some would say submissive — male fantasy. Even her iconic caveman pose has about it a person arrested in action rather than repose; in attack rather than invitation. The journey from the Rita Hayworth poster (in which Hayworth is kneeling on a bed in pants and a metallic bustier, looking over her shoulder in delighted surprise) to Welch’s poster (where Welch is clad in an animal skin outfit her character probably made herself to facilitate not seduction but freedom of violent movement), traces the journey of prisoner Andy Dufresne from “caught” to gloriously empowered and free. In her taboo-breaking turn in Tom Gries’ Burt Reynolds and Jim Brown-starring western 100 Rifles, her liberated revolutionary Sarita stops a Mexican general’s train by showering — in a long, man’s undershirt (that looks suspiciously like her One Million Years B.C. outfit) next to the tracks. As the men descend upon her lasciviously, she smiles that gigawatt smile, pumps her Winchester Model 1897 shotgun, and just starts blasting away.

Welch looks good handling a weapon. She’s a natural, an athlete with all the grace and self-confidence such a ascription implies. When she sprints to safety, she looks like she’s done it before. Gries had pushed her to do the scene nude and Welch refused on the grounds that it made no sense tactically. The sequence reminds me a lot of the “it’s bait” sequence from Mad Max: Fury Road, just the efficiency with which a powerful, athletic woman exploits the masculine desire to reduce her to an object of lust, thus blinding them to her actual status as an instrument of death. Welch’s repeated refusal to be nude in a film branded her as “difficult” for the rest of her career, as did her frankness about her disapproval of her co-stars’ sexual hijinks and impolitic opinions of actors who didn’t share her personal code of on and off-screen conduct. For me, I’m just grateful she agreed to an interracial sex scene with Brown in a mainstream production from 1969. 

It speaks volumes, too, that Welch considered her role as the post-transition Myra in Myra Breckinridge (1970) to be her breakthrough dramatic performance. Not that she was naive to the absurdity of Michael Sarne’s infamous adaptation of Gore Vidal’s novel, but that she was already given so few opportunities to be an actor rather than an image that she took even this opportunity as a precious one. Time has been kinder to the film than contemporary critics, but a recent rewatch confirms its largely a jumble of half-thought ideas recklessly executed. I will say, though, that Welch’s performance has aged particularly well. She holds up against giant hams like John Huston and Mae West, giving a committed, physical turn as a willful southern whirlwind, disguising herself as a doctor and aggressively molesting handsome Roger Herren while the ghosts of Marilyn Monroe and Rock Hudson look on. She ahem takes his temperature while he’s strapped to the examination table and declares “you have a lot to learn. All you men have a lot to learn. And I’ve taken it upon myself to teach you.” Dressed in a Wonder Woman bikini, she proceeds to deliver her lesson like Slim Pickens riding a nuclear bomb.

Welch was, in a word, threatening. There was nothing wilting about her, nothing declining and fey. Consider her in Burt Kennedy’s rousing, brutal rape-revenge western Hannie Caulder (1971), a response to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns in which Welch enlists a bounty hunter played by Robert Culp to teach her how to be a (very convincing) killer of the men who have graphically assaulted her. I love Peter Yates’ ambulance squad corruption actioner Mother, Jugs and Speed (1976) though I think Welch is largely wasted in a passive role; I love her in Herbert Ross’ The Last of Sheila (1973) as the guest of evil game-master James Coburn who maybe has it all figured out before anyone else; and I adore her in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1973) and its sequel as the landlord’s clumsy wife Constance who has an affair with Michael York’s d’Artagnan. Their first meeting isn’t a smoldering exchange of stolen glances, but her falling down a flight of stairs in front of him. Welch could’ve been an action star. She could’ve been a comedy star, too. But she looked the way she looked, was outspoken when the expectation was silence, and she was demure when they demanded her to be an exhibitionist. 

“Welch could’ve been an action star. She could’ve been a comedy star, too. But she looked the way she looked, she was outspoken when the expectation was silence, and she was demure when they demanded her to be an exhibitionist.” 

My favorite Raquel Welch performance is as single mom K.C. Carr in Jerrold Freedman’s Kansas City Bomber (1971). K.C. is a star roller derby player known, and feared, for her skating ability and, when provoked, her viciousness. “I believe that [screenwriter Barry Sandler] he had me in mind when he wrote it,” Welch said in a 1971 LA Times interview, “The girl is more than a little bitchy.” Welch was a big enough pop cultural phenomena during this period to have a film made just on her say-so and her desire to be “a little bitchy” in a film that showcases her athleticism alongside her genuine range as a dramatic actor, points to where Welch perhaps wishes her career had gone. K.C. relocates to Oregon with her kid, tries to find love with an unscrupulous manager (Kevin McCarthy) and is set up for a “big fight” in very much the way a male action star’s vehicle would conceive of a climactic boxing match. K.C. is supposed to throw the match on behalf of her manager-now-boyfriend but she can’t bring herself to do it.

Kansas City Bomber, in fact, shares a lot of DNA with Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974). There’s a scene in the middle of a film at a rowdy honky tonk where the team has retired after a tough match. K.C. fends off unwelcome advances from male admirers, takes a difficult call about her kid, tries to make a connection with her on-team rival, all in the space of a few minutes. Welch is a natural on skates, fists flying along with hard-boiled quips and threats, but she’s also a natural as a human being juggling multiple, sometimes conflicting, responsibilities at what is essentially a workplace function. What emerges is a full portrait of the difficulties a woman has in navigating interpersonal and professional relationships. Welch exudes empathy, vulnerability, confusion, but then in the next breath she’s a vision on wheels, a warrior risking a sure thing for the right to do and say what she feels, damn the torpedoes! Look at the sequence where K.C. skates breakneck down suburban streets with her tough little daughter Rita (Jodie Foster) for what increasingly feels like a mentor relationship, a glimpse of the lighting of a torch and its passing.

Welch’s appeal was you couldn’t have her. You couldn’t catch her if she didn’t want to be caught, and if you did, she could beat you to death. She was an icon about thirty years ahead of her time, and it’s worth reconsidering what kind of icon she should be remembered as. 

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available.