VCI Entertainment announced this past week that actor-turned-director Don “Red” Barry’s 1954 notorious “runaway” Western, Jesse James’ Women, will be heading to DVD in all of its Technicolor glory on Oct. 11.
Westerns are made in “Hollywood,” everyone knows that. Sure, you may have location shooting in Lone Pine or Monument Valley, but for the most part Westerns of the 1930s, 40s and 50s were Hollywood productions — from the big studios to those of poverty row.
When exhibitor Lloyd Royal teamed up with his business partner, Tom Garraway, to form the Panorama Pictures Corp. they decided for their first film production it would be a Western, but it wasn’t going to be shot out west … nope, they would do the whole thing in their home town of Silver Creek, Mississippi.
To that end they recruited popular Western star Don “Red” Barry to star, and for the first time in his film career, direct (the thought being, you know how to make a Western … you’ve been in a ton of them).
He would star as Jesse James, but the story wouldn’t be about his bank robbing and outlaw ways (sure, there would be plenty of that), but about his women … and it would all be shot in Technicolor and not in black and white!!
The women, well they recruited Peggie Castle (Harem Girl, Wagons West, Invasion U.S.A., The Yellow Tomahawk … and later as Lily Merrill in the Lawman television series) to co-star as Waco Gans, the co-owner of the Golden Bell Saloon. Also in the cast are the banker’s daughter, Caprice Clark (played by Joyce Barrett), Cattle Kate Kennedy (Betty Brueck) and Delta, a songstress (Lita Baron, aka: Isabelita … as Zia in Jungle Jim and Losana in Bomba on Panther Island, plus such films as Red Sundown and The Broken Star).
With so many attractive young women to juggle, it is only a matter of time before they will all arrive in the same spot at the same time (the Golden Bell), where all hell breaks loose.
Meanwhile, Jesse and his brother Frank (Jack Buetel — as Billy the Kid in The Outlaw … and as Deputy Jeff Taggert in the Judge Roy Bean TV series), along with Cole Younger (Sam Keller) and future turncoat, Bob Ford (Michael Carr — Flying Disc Man from Mars, Apache Warrior), busy themselves with bank robberies and stage coach holdups.
A very entertaining Western, with an interesting spin on Jesse James … so why “notorious?” That’s easy, you have an upstart film production and distribution company not from Hollywood, and a film shot in Mississippi, that quickly set the “established” Hollywood community on Panorama’s cast. This took the form bullying and intimidation from the PCA Administration — the infamous “The Production Code Administration” — who suggested that the film would not be approved for exhibition because of various “moral” issues.
To get back into their good graces, the “cat fights” between Jesse’s lady acquaintances had to be toned down and an insert with a newspaper headline screaming that Jesse James had been shot (bad guys don’t win) were the compromises that had to be made.
The irony, Lloyd Royal and his fledgling Panorama Pictures laughed all the way to the bank as box office receipts from Jesse James’ Women — complete with theatrical posters and advertising that included the catch-phrase, “Beauty vs Beauty for the love of Jesse James!” — were on the order of twenty-times the film’s production budget!!
Don “Red” Barry did not direct another film and went back to the acting side of the camera for the rest of his film career.
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