Esclavas del crimen

I caught The Dalton Girls late last night on The Westerns Channel. It was a unique concept of female outlaws in the old west and I stayed with it all the way to the end because I wanted to find out the fate of each of the four girls. The story was easy to follow and the action scenes and stunt work were all well handled. The four Dalton Girls, sisters of the now deceased Dalton Brothers, are driven to a life of crime when Holly, the oldest, kills their brothers' undertaker for trying to rape her. She smashes him in the head with a shovel. With her three sisters, they set about robbing banks and stagecoaches. These girls are as good with guns and horses as any man. Holly (Merry Anders) tries to protect the youngest, Marigold (Sue George), who seems to not fit in with a life on the run. Rose (Lisa Davis), is a cold blooded killer doing just what she wants. Columbine (Penny Edwards) is an efficient criminal, but hopes to find a way out some day. It's even part musical. Rose sings "Can't Trust a Man" accompanied by Columbine on the harmonica. As I watched, I noticed a slight British accent creeping into some of Lisa Davis' lines, and I checked her out on IMDb. Sure enough, she was born in England. Penny Edwards was hand picked by Dale Evans to replace her as Roy Rogers gal pal in some RR movies when Dale was expecting a baby. John Russell is really good as the gambler who loves Columbine and keeps turning up wherever the girls go. This is a good western, overall, and is kind of a forerunner of the 1994 movie, "Bad Girls." Western fans will enjoy watching "The Dalton Girls."

Bel Air Productions of THE DALTON GIRLS consists of four resilient and completely bad-ass sage-riding sisters of The Dalton Gang, all freshly dead... the men that is... and their gorgeous siblings are as follows...

Merry Anders as the mother figure, and darn good with a gun; Lisa Davis is the wildcard killer, and even better with a gun; Sue George is the quiet, baby-faced youngest; and Penny Edwards is... in a Western with four pretty sisters... the pretty one, as in, the most girly and classy and who the handsome leading man is after...

In-between the title gang robbing a stagecoach, a saloon and then a high-stakes hotel room poker game, square-jawed gambler John Russell desperately yearns to protect Penny Edwards' Columbine Dalton, who, along with the youngest (both recent graduates of a fancy finishing school) isn't all that crazy about life on the run, like the older two.

Edwards, no stranger to the dusty genre, makes a wonderful kind of pawn, vulnerable to the suspenseful action-packed violence with b-starlet Merry Anders providing a solid baseline...

But it's Lisa Davis as Alpha Female Rose that steals the picture, proving she's tough as any man... maybe even tougher. Ultimately, it's her fight to lose.

This western belongs to the short list of westerns involving female gunslingers and duels between them. It is a lousy picture but excellent for me, very unusual for this kind of productions. There would have been more of them. The best example of what Grade B pictures could provide from time to time.

Like Howard Hughes' "The Outlaw" (1943), "The Dalton Girls" (1957) was a mixed genre film; a standard "B" western with very deliberate exploitation elements. Although both films attempted a tie-in to real western history, "The Dalton Girls" wisely soft-peddled this element; the only connection being that the four girls were sisters of the guys who started the Dalton Gang.

Although almost any "B" western fan will enjoy the film, it is a must see for those who get off on cowgirls in tight jeans and gun belts. That was the film's drawing card at the time of its release and even today it doesn't get any better than Merry Anders, Lisa Davis, and Penny Edwards robbing stagecoaches and banks. Edwards is my all-time favorite cowgirl and does all the difficult riding stunts in the film. There is even a scene where she hogties a teenage boy.

The film also features John Russell (who would soon star in his own television show, "Lawman") as an early anti-hero. He is an interesting mix of Richard Boone's "Paladin" character (tough but philosophical) and Bret Maverick (a calculating realist of a gambler). Sam Rolfe may have seen this film in pre-release and incorporated some of Russell's traits into the "Paladin" character he was creating. Oddly, the character's name is W.T. (Illinois) Grey but he claims New Orleans as his hometown.

"The Dalton Girl's" moves along nicely and then kind of clunks to a stop with an extremely lame and rushed ending.

The screenwriter (Maurice Tombragel) obviously had a lot of fun with this adaptation, and the story operates on two levels. There are some nice self-parody elements inserted throughout the story. The best is a scene where Lisa Davis is singing about how having a gun is better than having a man:

"Oh you can't trust a man, because a man will lie. But a gun stays beside you, until the day that you die. Oh a man is a cheater, with his trifling ways. But a gun's always faithful, because a gun never strays. Oh a man is unfaithful, he will lead you to strife. But a gun is my true love, yes a gun is my life".

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

Actually this is not a half-bad Western if you're not expecting much, and certainly the title doesn't promise much in the way of artistry. What this B-flick has going for it are some well- staged scenes on the prairie and a couple of tough-minded chick scenes, especially the robbery episodes. The acting is uneven, to say the least. Merry Anders is fine as Holly, the leader, as is Lisa Davis as Rose, the second toughie. However, poor Sue George as Marigold should have auditioned for Leave It to Beaver. Maybe you won't have as much trouble as I did telling these "flowers" apart, but they do look alike and it can get confusing. Judging from the title, you'd probably expect more titillation than there is-- after all, this is the 1950's. Nonetheless, there is a legitimate feminist undercurrent even if much is compromised in the end. All in all, this minor production from a couple of old pro's (director Le Borg and producer Schenck) remains a rather interesting artifact as well as a fairly viable piece of period entertainment.