Calamity Jane - Letters to Her Daughter

Overview

This film is not exactly a documentary; it is a person reading the book while visiting the places where she lived, taking pictures of it in the early eighties. The letters to her daughter, whom she gave away to foster parents in Virginia after Wild Bill had been shot in the back in a saloon in Deadwood, show her in another light: as a woman who clearly understood social taboos of our society and, on one hand, she rejected what society dictated and, on the other, she longed for the bourgeois lifestyle. Many people argued that those were not real, since it was considered to be illiterate. The truth is, she was, and she tried to learn later in life just enough as to write a bare few words, and at times she also employed others in writing things for her.