The Tall Women (1966)

An Apache attack on a wagon train bound for Fort Lafayette leaves just seven survivors, all women who hid in a nearby cave during the final assault.

Left with just a little food and water and a couple of weapons, the group decides to try to walk the 100 miles to the fort.

A former school teacher named Mary Ann (Anne Baxter) assumes command of the small party. She was convinced to travel to San Francisco by her sister and her sister’s husband, both of whom died in the attack.

The band also includes a pair of circus performers, the Grimaldi sisters; an immigrant named Ursula who lost her husband and young child in the attack; a young blonde named Bridgette, who won’t part with her hand-held mirror, another young blonde traveling to the fort to meet her fiance; and a Mexican woman named Pilar who’s a bit more knowledgable in the ways of the West than the rest.

But it doesn’t take long for the Indians to realize they’ve escaped. And the rescue parties sent to search for the missing wagon train — which was also carrying a cache of new rifles and ammunition — has trouble finding them.

That means the small party’s success in reaching their destination will depend largely on their own survival skills. Plus their ability to dodge the Indians, and outsmart them when they can’t dodge them.

Review:

A curious little film that includes too much silliness to be taken very seriously. For instance, a badly wounded wagon passenger passes out, then wakes up and estimates the distance left to the fort because, hey, he’s been listening to those wagon wheels roll all along.

But if you watch knowing it’s just light-hearted fun, it might be the best of the trio of Westerns Sidney Pink directed in Europe, a group that also includes “Finger on the Trigger” (1965) and “The Christmas Kid.”

There are some neat touches. The circus performer named Betty has a long list of ex-boyfriends, all of whom seem to have taught her skills that serve the group well, from how to kill two rabbits with one bullet (!) to how to climb a mountain (!!).

It doesn’t hurt that our seven are a quite fetching bunch. It does hurt that the performances of most of the leading men in the film — including Gustavo Rojo as the wannabe-hero and Fernando Hilbeck as the Indian chief — are embarrassingly bad, almost painful to watch.

Directed by:
Sidney Pink
Rudolph Zehetgruber

Cast:
Anne Baxter … Mary Ann
Maria Perschy … Ursula
Perla Cristal … Pilar
Maria Mahor … Dorothy
Adriana Ambessi … Katy Grimaldi
Rosella Como … Betty Grimaldi
Christa Linder … Bridgette
Gustavo Rojo … Gus McIntosh
Fernando Hilbeck … White Cloud
Luis Prendes … Pope
John Clark … Col. Howard
Alejandra Nilo … White Cloud’s squaw

Runtime: 104 min.

aka:
Las siete magníficas
Sette donne per una strage
Seven Vengeful Women

Music: Gregory G. Segura (Gregorio García Segura), Carlo Savina, Gerhard Froboeß

Memorable lines:

Mary Ann, of a wounded Indian: “What’ll we do with him?”
Ursula, who lost her husband and infant child in the attack: “I’ll show you what to do with him.” She reaches for her late husband’s sword. “We’ll chop him up into little pieces.”

Ursula, after the Indian captive escapes: “You should have shot him right at the moment you woke up, you dumb bitch.”
Bridgette: “Don’t call me names, or I’ll slap your face.”

Pilar: “I know Indians better than you do. You really want to know the truth? They want to play with us a while. And then capture us alive.”
Dorothy: “What for?”
Pilar: “They are men. And we are women.”
Dorothy: “Oh, no!”
Mary Ann: “Oh, yes.”

Mary Ann: “Do you really think we’ll make it?”
Pilar: “No. I don’t think so.”

Mary Ann: “How do you like that? A man finally shows up and he’s too sick to help us.”

Trivia:

This marked one of the final film roles for Anne Baxter, who continued to work on TV shows through the mid-1980s. western fans might best remember her opposite Gregory Peck in “Yellow Sky” (1948) or Glenn Ford in “Cimarron” (1960).

In his book “So You Want to Make Movies,” Sidney Pink said this film was his favorite of the 45 with which he was involved and blames himself for allowing “the budget to get in the way of making what could have been a memorable movie.”

That said, Pink also called this the “toughest job I had ever tackled,” adding that the actresses “worked like dogs with very little rest” and all seven checked into a Madrid Hospital at the end of the shoot.

Anne Baxter, Perla Cristal and Adriana Ambesi might be familiar to Western fans, but the rest of Sidney’s seven probably won’t. Perhaps the arduous filming conditions caused them to shy away from westerns after this film. Christa Linder did have a prominent role in “Day of Anger” (1967), which starred Lee Van Cleef and Giuliano Gemma.