She was in pure survival mode in that scene. Frank had explicitly said “Do this or I will kill you”.
When Harmonica ripped off her clothes, he was putting on a show for the assassins, so they’d be at ease because they thought he was only there to rape her.
I understand she was in “survival mode,” but she looks like she’s really enjoying it. Kind of reminds me of the rape scene in Straw Dogs.
Regarding Harmonica, that makes sense, I suppose. I’ll have to watch that part again to make sure, but I thought it’s in a fairly enclosed area where the assassins would have a difficult time seeing what’s happening.
Seems to me that there would be three basic ways of approaching this:
1. the film is an attempt to recreate what the filmmakers believed to be the actual attitudes of/towards women at the time/place the film is set
2. the film reflects something of the values and attitudes of the filmmakers and/or the cultures from which they came at the time the film was made.
3. Some combination of 1 & 2.
I don’t think she was enjoying it, I think she was just really good at pretending to enjoy it from her experience as a prostitute.
She doesn’t see sex as something holy directly related to her identity, she sees it as a commodity. From her perspective in that scene, she was trading it for her life as she used to trade it for money, and making the same performance.
there’s a lot of rape in leone’s films. That’s why I didn’t like Once Upon A Time In America
JAH
I should preface this by saying I’m a big fan of Leone’s films, especially this one. I’m not trying to start some controversy, but I’m curious what others think.
Having watched the new Blu-ray edition of this (it looks and sounds great), a couple of things bother me about this film. Now, I know, it’s a western and women are almost always looked down upon in westerns (as was common during that time period), but I felt really turned off when Jill (Claudia Cardinale) is submissive to Frank (Henry Fonda). The whole scene just takes me out of the film and feels artificial and unrealistic. The fact she was a prostitute beforehand doesn’t make it any more credible. After all, she married to get out of and away from that life, so it just strikes me as misogynistic to have her submit herself so willingly and animalistically to Frank, the man who killed her whole family. “You love the feel of a man’s hands on you.” WTF?
Something else that always puzzles me is when Harmonica first encounters Jill at the Sweetwater home and gets rough with her and starts to strip off her top. Was he considering raping her? Seems out of character for him to do something like that. Maybe I’m reading into all this too much but it’s another part where I just get taken away from the film and get confused.