While the story of "The Tonto Woman" certainly has its place in Leonard's Old-West canon, it fails as a contemporary film to update the rusty wayward-man-saved-by-a-virtuous-woman archetypal narrative.
It must be said that the film makes excellent use of shooting locations in the rocky Andalucian canyons to serve as a spare and rugged American West at the cusp of expansion, and that sense of solitude is adroitly transferred onto the title character, marooned as she supposedly is by her unapproachable husband, who lives in an often-gestured-at-but-never-seen big house in the distance. However, as we see in several opening scenes, this woman is much stronger and individualistic than the strong-arming plot has allowed her to be. That is, when the Mojave plan to tattoo her face, she tells them to make it elaborate, not some half-ass dribble; when her husband's henchmen come to scare off her suitor, she gets a gun and drives them off.
The plot, though, continues to cast her as the product of some irrevocable sorrow, which can only be healed by a man who affords her the dignity she deserves. But there's the rub: she is well aware of her dignity already. Once we witness this woman's resolve, shouldn't we question why this man needs to show up? Sure, it's a romance, set during a time when women were very often subjugated, but haven't we heard that story a hundred times, and don't we need new ones? This one rapidly becomes a typical masculine fairy tale: The tough cattle rustler buys her a fancy cleavage-revealing dress; she swims and steps from the lake naked before him while he remains fully clothed, and embraces her as if she's weak; in an emotional show-down, he makes her husband see her as worthy. Us men are so strong and resolute! Always! ...But we're not evocative characters. Films like this forget that audiences wish to be surprised by characters that display the complexity of behavior that pushes them beyond character, toward the humane. I can't help but as "what if..." What if the Vega's cattle rustling character was made vulnerable by his love for this woman, so much that HE was the one that went swimming naked while she remained clothed? What if Tonto Woman wasn't so virtuous, if she was a little duplicitous? Of course, then we wouldn't have the mythic story we have, but we might have something that goes beyond merely affirming what we want to believe about people, something that asks us to see human behavior in its true complexity.
