BY JOHN M. WHALEN
Long before the coronavirus and social distancing became
a reality, before TV became mainly a source of information about the current
pandemic, there used to be a thing called the “made-for-TV†movie. They’re
pretty much an artifact of the past now, new ones showing up mainly on the
Lifetime and Hallmark cable channels. But beginning in the 1960s up to the late
90s, there were tons of made-for-TV movies churned out on all the networks.
Some of the more famous ones, like “The Burning Bed†with Farrah Fawcett, and
“The Day After†with Jason Robards, achieved a level of quality that earned
them Golden Globes and Emmys. But for the most part the TV movie was known
mainly for low budgets, hackneyed direction, mediocre acting and half-baked
scripts.
While the Aaron Spelling-produced “Wild Women†(1970),
starring Hugh O'Brian and five femme fatales, was not Emmy winning material, it
wasn’t the worst TV movie ever made either. A comedy western directed by Don
Taylor, “Wild Women†tells the tale of five female prisoners in a Union army stockade
given the chance to earn their freedom by volunteering for a dangerous mission.
If that sounds like a femme version of “The Dirty Dozen,†you’d be right. Except
this is a low budget movie, so we get only five volunteers instead of a dozen.
We get our first glimpse of the ladies inside the
stockade shouting and screaming at two of their number scratching and clawing
each other in a raucous catfight. Riding in from the desert, is Army scout
Killian (Hugh O’Brian). Killian (no first name) is given orders by Col. Donahue
(Robert Simon), to lead an “expedition†down to the Mexican border for the
purpose of finding and mapping a shorter trail than the one that currently
takes three weeks. The U.S. is about to annex Texas from Mexico and war with our southern
neighbor is imminent. The “expedition†will be an undercover operation with
five soldiers posing as harmless settlers and five female prisoners posing as
their wives. Cannon and rifles will be hidden inside the covered wagons they’ll
be riding in.
If that idea doesn’t sound crazy enough, the teleplay by
Richard Carr and Lou Morheim, based on a novel by Vincent Fotre, gives us a cast of characters that is, for lack
of a better word ,incongruous at best. The women who are selected for the mission
include the blonde and beautiful Jean Marshek (Anne Francis), the sexy southern
belle Nancy Belacourt (Sherry Jackson), the alluring half-Apache Mit-O-Ne
(Cynthia Hull), the grey haired, lead-slinging card dealer Lotte Clampett
(Marie Windsor) and former madam Maude Webber (Marilyn Maxwell). The soldiers
who will go on the expedition are not exactly what you would expect either.
Instead of trained cavalrymen or expert sharpshooters, the men are all
topographical engineers who wouldn’t know a Winchester from a Howitzer. You
have to admit, these aren’t the kinds of characters who typically populate a
movie like this, and that’s one of the things I liked about it.
Of course, there’s got to be a love interest somewhere in
the story, and naturally, Jean and Killian have a past. She was a card dealer
in a casino a few years ago who ripped him off to the tune of $80 but only
after she had fallen in love with him. However, she discovered he was about to
skip out on her. Naturally, that all turns out to be a misunderstanding.
The expedition starts out for their immediate destination,
a deserted town where four Texas Rangers will be waiting for them to escort
them the rest of the way. Along the journey, the geeky soldiers and the wild
women begin to grow on each other. After a night of drinking and dancing, one
of the soldiers nearly empties the expedition’s water barrel. On a search for
more water, aided by the half-apache Mit-O-Ne, they find a water hole but a
band of Mescaleros shows up and forbids them to drink from it. “Only Apache,
may drink,†Chief Cadete (Michael Keep) tells them.
There’s only one way to settle this. Killian takes his
shirt off and challenges him to a fight. You know how Hugh O’Brian liked to
show off that hairy chest. The chief wants to fight in the water with knives.
Killian in a kind of chickenshit move suggests just using fists. Astonishingly,
Cadete agrees. What kind of a Mescalero is he, anyway? I guess the writers were
out on a coffee break when they shot that scene.
After the waterhole scene they make it to the deserted
town only to find out the Texas Rangers who were supposed to meet them are all
dead, killed by Mexican soldiers, some of whom the expedition had run into
earlier. Killian knows the Mexicans will descend on them before long, so they
have to make a stand. In an even stranger twist, the wild women take the men
aside and teach them how to shoot the rifles and canon they brought with them.
These gals have been around.
Kino Lorber did a nice job transferring “The Wild Womenâ€
to a 1920x1080p Blu-Ray in standard 1.33:1 aspect ratio. Image and color are
good. The soundtrack is mono and the music score by Fred Steiner, supervised by
George Duning, is well recorded. This is one of those flicks were the entire
score is basically multiple versions of the same tune played at different
tempos and moods. In this case the theme is based on the old folk song, “Sweet
Betsy from Pike.†It grows on you.
Included as an extra is an interesting and informative audio
Commentary by film historian Lee Gambin, who notes the similarities between
“Wild Women†and “The Guns of Fort Petticoat.†However, he mistakenly
identifies Gene Autry as the star of “Petticoat,†when in actual fact it was
Audie Murphy. Nobody’s perfect. The disc also includes trailers for a number of
Kino Lorber Blu-rays.
Since you’re now a prisoner quarantined in your own home,
you could do worse than turn Wolf Blitzer off for 74 minutes and give this
Kino-Lorber Blu-Ray a spin.
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John M. Whalen is the author of "Tragon of Ramura". Click here to order from Amazon.