Ian McKellen's Only Western Is This Forgotten '90s Gem

Ian McKellen's illustrious film career spans almost six decades (though, amazingly, he's never won an Oscar). As such, you'd expect there to be a few Westerns in his filmography, but the only time the esteemed British star ventured into the Old West was with 1993's "The Ballad of Little Jo." Sadly, it was a commercially anticlimactic Western debut for McKellan, with the film bringing in just $514,451 at the box office on a $4 million budget. On the other hand, "The Ballad of Little Jo" earned positive reviews and more than 30 years later, it's well worth a revisit.

Before he became a movie star, McKellan made his name as a well-respected stage actor, becoming a Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theater mainstay. While the Western was still popular when McKellan debuted on-stage in the 1960s, then, he was hardly running in the kind of circles that would facilitate roles in oaters of the time.

Instead, the actor made his film debut in the 1969 drama "A Touch of Love," though Clive Donner's historical epic "Alfred the Great" premiered in McKellan's native United Kingdom a couple months prior. But the actor didn't become well-known for his big screen performances until the mid-1990s when he played King Richard III in 1995's "Richard III" before reaching mass audiences by portraying Magneto in the "X-Men" movies and Gandalf in Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. By the time McKellan's best film roles came along, then, the Western was well and truly dead. Which partly explains why he's only ever made one in his time.

As the Western fell out of favor in the 1970s, Ian McKellan stayed away from the big screen altogether. By the time he made 1981's "Priest of Love," the oater's standing as the most popular movie genre had long since been usurped by sci-fi. That might go some way to explaining why it took McKellan another 12 years to actually appear in a Western.

Thankfully, 1993's "The Ballad of Little Jo" is one '90s Western that very much holds up today. Writer/director Maggie Greenwald based her screenplay on the real-life story of Joe Monaghan, a cattle rancher and prospector who lived as a man in the 19th Century but was assigned female at birth. "The Ballad of Little Jo" begins with Josephine "Jo" Monaghan (Suzy Amis) falling pregnant with an illegitimate child, much to the disapproval of Jo's well-to-do family. After giving up the baby, Jo sets out for the frontier, where predatory men pose a constant threat, with Jo ultimately being captured and sold into bondage. So, after escaping, Jo decides to start living as a man as a form of protection against the constant predation.

First working as a sheep herder for a fellow named Frank Badger (Bo Hopkins), Monaghan eventually carves out a life as Jo, buying a homestead in Ruby City. Soon, Chinese laborer Tinman Wong (David Chung) moves in, and the two start a relationship before the Western Cattle Company makes a play for their land. McKellan plays Ruby City local Percy Corcoran, who appears to be kind when sober but becomes quite cruel when inebriated. All of that made for a revisionist Western that critics loved, although "The Ballad of Little Jo" otherwise went (sadly) overlooked.

Shot on location in Montana's Red Lodge, near Yellowstone National Park, "The Ballad of Little Jo" wasn't just a well-acted and subversive revisionist Western, it was a beautifully-shot film, too. If you're only going to make one Western, then, you could do a lot worse than Maggie Greenwald's 1993 effort, which remains Ian McKellan's only experimentation with the genre. That's despite the fact he seemed to enjoy making the movie. As he wrote on his official website, "The air was fresh and I loved filming in such spectacular surroundings, especially when the snow fell. It was fun learning something of life in the West."

While the film made little money, its 77% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes is a testament to its success with critics. In his review, Bob Fenster of the Arizona Republic wrote, "'The Ballad of Little Jo' is a unique bit of history that is undoubtedly far more credible than any nonsense Hollywood will produce about women gunslingers." Derek Malcolm of The Guardian also praised Greenwald's "luxuriant portrait of the old West," which he described as "beautiful, lonely and acutely dangerous." Elsewhere, Roger Ebert, was particularly impressed with Suzy Amis, calling her "a wonderful actor" in his three-star review and praising her for "work[ing] some kind of magic, so that we accept her as a man despite our doubts."

It's a shame, then, that "The Ballad of Little Jo" has been mostly forgotten since its 1993 debut — especially since you could make a strong case for it being one of the best Westerns of the '90s. Luckily, the film wasn't so overlooked that it has since become lost media. You can rent "The Ballad of Little Jo" from all the usual platforms.