I watched recently a DVD of a movie starring Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones, The Homesman. This movie in one sense echoed one of my favorites, The African Queen, with Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart. In both cases a high-minded religious woman has to travel, and a low-life drifter is coaxed into joining her in her travel. In The African Queen, of course, the Hepburn character, a missionary in contested territory, [that is, African territory contested between two great Imperial Powers in 1914] has to travel because the outbreak of war, both in Europe and amongst the administrations of the contending nations' colonies in Africa, has made her situation impossible. The nearest safe place for her as a British subject is Kenya. In The Homesman by contrast, Swank's character is traveling because there are three madwomen in her small isolated town in the middle of the Nebraska territory. These women have to be taken, in what looks essentially like a horse-drawn jai...