I Am the Woman

A nickelodeon fever-dream stitched from tattered nitrate, I Am the Woman slings its heroine through a carnival of masculine appetite—Texas Guinan’s eyes, kohl-ringed and flint-sparked, surveil the saloon like twin revolvers. Buck Rumsey’s sheriff, half swagger, half wound, barges in hunting a phantom crime; instead he finds Guinan’s nameless diva, a pistol in a satin holster, warbling defiance while every chord from the upright piano vibrates like a threat. Francis Ford’s preacher, collar starched with self-loathing, tries to scrub her soul with brimstone but only smears the sin across the screen. Frederick Moore’s railroad heir arrives with a diamond stickpin and a debt to daddy, promising Manhattan towers yet delivering a leash of pearls. Valerio Olivo’s accordion breathes Morricone before Morricone, squeezing out laments that coil around the ankles of the barroom brawlers. Between poker hands and prayer meetings the film fractures into iris-shot vignettes: a child’s marble rolling beneath swing-doors, a blood-drop blooming on a white glove, a close-up of Guinan’s teeth catching cigar-light like a wolf in sequins. The plot—ostensibly a crusade to “save” one soiled dove—mutates into a séance where every man confesses through her mouth; she answers by rewriting the myth in gunsmoke and rouge. The climax isn’t a showdown but a striptease of identity: she peels off each male-imposed alias—whore, penitent, muse—until only the core pronoun remains, blazing on the intertitle like a manifesto: I.