Hello aldredheron,
That's a good point, and though it has been discussed somewhere in the thread, I like the way you formulate it. Let me repeat shortly what I tried to say in my previous posts.
The fact Eowyn withstands Witch King makes her undoubtedly heroic, as she is a human and is not supposed to bear such a terror, so Gandalf doesn't need to loose in order to stress this. But Gandalf's failure makes her some sort of Hollywood superhero who wins whenever it is scheduled in the script regardless how silly it could look. If she was able to dispatch such an enemy, why not to deal with Sauron in the same way?
Let me bring here this quote from the other forum:
Quote:
http://www.sffworld.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12663
vgunn
A bit more is mentioned by Tolkien in his letters. Here is something from #156.
Quote:
"He [Gandalf] is still under the obligation of concealing his power and of teaching rather than forcing or dominating wills, but where the physical powers of the Enemy are too great for the good will of the opposers to be effective he can act in emergency as an 'angel'. ..... He [Gandalf] alone is left to forbid the entrance of the Lord of Nazgul to Minas Tirith, when the City has been overthrown and its Gates destroyed – and yet so powerful is the whole train of human resistance, that he himself has kindled and organized, that in fact no battle between the two occurs: it passes to other mortal hands."
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Moreover, without making Eowyn more heroic, PJ makes Gandalf look completely ridiculous, after the latter describes himself in The Two Towers as the most dangerous creature in ME save for Sauron. Having said that Gandalf is not able to withstand Witch King. Very silly.
On top of that the scene makes a great confusion about the course of events in ME. We know that the power of Witch King is provided by Sauron. In order to switch off another maia, Sauron needed to invest most of his remaining power into the Black Captain; as someone wrote in other forum, he, in fact, had to inhabit Witch King's body. In this case Witch King's preliminary end would have been as disastrous for Sauron as the loss of the Ring. He would definitely have lost the ability to keep his numerous armies in obedience and probably his shadowy embodiment as well. Nothing like this happens neither in the book nor in the movie.
There was also an idea that PJ made Gandalf a lesser being than an angelic spirit of maia, so he didn't supersede Witch King in power. However, Gandalf says in The Two Towers that his name was Olorin and in The Felowship he courteously introduces himself to Balrog as a wielder of the flame of Anor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Fire
I am referring to PJ's movies, not to books only. If Gandalf is not an embodiment of maia Olorin, we can't say who Sauron is etc, the whole Tolkien's universe will not work and it's going to be a different fiction.