Hannie Caulder (1972)

The primal conflicts of the wild, wild west were not confined to the bloody and barbarous spats between “cowboys and Indians.” Back in those days of free-range cattle drives across vast cactus lands, there were also reams of documented war crimes committed in the battle of the sexes. The titular heroine of Hannie Caulder (1972), played by top-heavy action figure Raquel Welch, does her bit to correct the gender imbalance. If the iconic sexpot hadn’t empowered women with this flick, we may not have ever seen Sharon Stone in Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead (1995), Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films (2003-2004), or Natalie Portman in Jane Got a Gun (2016). Burt Kennedy’s cult western begins when a trio of trouble (Ernest Borgnine, Strother Martin, Jack Elam) rides in to Hannie’s homestead. After they kill her husband and help themselves to her unwanted affections, the affronted frontierswoman seeks vengeance. As such, the busty babe hires bounty hunter Thomas Price (Robert Culp) and Bailey (Christopher Lee) to teach her how to shoot a gun. Of course, hot-headed Hannie’s six-shooter is the least lethal of her weapons against a man’s natural defensives. This is all too clear when the built beauty bends over a dude who she’s just beaned on the head with a pistol. In doing so, she flashes some of her crackage when her poncho is lifted by the wind. Because this movie was produced by Raquel’s then husband Peter Cooper, he knew how to shoot her booty!