cult film freak: PENNY EDWARDS IN 'THE DALTON GIRLS' WITH MERRY ANDERS

Penny Edwards (mother of actress Deborah Winters) and John Russell in THE DALTON GIRLS Year: 1957 Rating: ****

Bel Air Productions' THE DALTON GIRLS consists of four resilient and mostly 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, who's darn good with a gun; Lisa Davis is the wildcard killer, and even better with a gun; Sue George is the passive baby-faced baby of the family; and Penny Edwards is — in a Western with four pretty ladies — the pretty one, as in, the most girly and classy and who the handsome leading man is after...

Penny Edwards with Lisa Davis in THE DALTON GIRLS with Merry Anders & Sue George

In-between the titular gang robbing a stagecoach, a bank, 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 finishing school graduates), aren't all that crazy about life on the run, like the older two.

Edwards, no stranger to the dusty genre, makes for an important 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 who steals the picture — repeatedly proving she's as tough as any man... maybe even tougher. Ultimately, it's her fight to lose.