User Reviews

I just watched FBW on a DVD I got from eBay. It had been taped from TV to VHS and then transferred to DVD. The picture wasn't great, but it was very watchable.

This movie is a bit of a minor league "Stagecoach." Marshall Kirk Reed (Jeff Morrow) is taking five female prisoners to the penitentiary. He is assisted by Deputies Tom Ames (George Kramer) and Big Foot (Guinn "Big Boy" Williams). Also along is a railroad executive whose appears totally uncredited. The prisoners are outlaw Big Pearl Jackson (Irish McCalla), outlaw's wife Ellen Downs (Merry Anders), card cheat Kitty Brewster (Kathy Marlowe), knife killer Maria Garcia (Lucita Blain), and demented baby killer Hanna Gates (Dee Carroll).

Along the way, they have to contend with Ellen's husband, The Missouri Kid (Jim Ross, who also produced), trying to free his wife, and rampaging Comanches. A romance develops between Marshal Kirk and prisoner Ellen. Can the stalwart lawmen possibly get their prisoners safely to the final destination?

Irish McCalla steals the movie. She dominates every scene that she's in with her big personality. Irish is a delight too see. Also, watch closely for just a bit of a suggestion of a romantic relationship between Big Pearl and Kitty. It's pretty subtle, but it's there.

Five Bold Women (1960) is a surprisingly good and entertaining western. It's definitely worth watching.

Five Bold Women Review 1959. Western. Criminal Human Females. Irish McCalla. Merry Anders. Comanches. Stagecoaches. Escapes. Tied-Up. Mime or Mimic?

Short on the women, long on exposition: it's hard just getting there: with five deadbeat women: and five deadbeat actors. Irish McCalla has the best lines. No jungle here. Nothing else to report. Black Monolith with apes: 0; Ape-tastic: 1; Monkeys at a Typewriter: 0; Conelrad Alert: 0; Indian Head Test Pattern: 1; Tied-Up: 5.

The five deadbeat women were all sinister.

Marshall Jeff Morrow is escorting five women to prison. They're not happy about it, and neither is Jim Ross, the outlaw husband of convict Merry Anders. Plus there are Comanches.

It's a cheap western that promises a lot more exploitation than it delivers, which I attribute to one of the writers, Jack Pollexfen. He's credited in some of my favorite bad movies, and I can see his clumsy hand here. Visually it might be interesting, since it's the third feature with Haskell Wexler as the DP, but the Eastmancolor print I looked at had turned brown and taken most of the details with it. Still, the presence of Big Boy Williams as one of the cast makes it an interesting movie, if only for the Bacon Numbers.

This is a B Wild West feature but surprisingly good as such. The five convict ladies to be brought across Texas from one jail to a better one, close to the Mexican border, are a load of ignited dynamite, no one knows the length of the fuse, but everybody knows it is there and sizzling. The five lady jailbirds are very different characters charged with very different crimes. One of them is a professional bank robber, Irish McCalla, the best of them, one is mad from a terrible Comanche trauma, one is all lewdness and one killed her rapist, and the fifth is the accomplice of a notorious villain, Missouri Kid, her actual husband, who is still out there somewhere working for her escape. Sure, he lines up with the transport and almost gets away with it and with her, but the marshal Jeff Morrow who is responsible for the precarious transport, is not as dumb as he seems. He actually gets involved with two of the women. There is a deputy also of course, and others to safeguard the transport, but Missouri Kid ultimately gets the better of them, until he and his four remaining liberated lady convicts are surprised by the Comanches, and so there are some additional gunfights. It's a great and dramatic story, the direction is fairly good, so is the music, but of course the B quality shines through technically. Anyway, on the whole, it is satisfactory enough for a good western.