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The Paleface
USA 1948
produced by Robert L. Welch for Paramount
directed by Norman Z. McLeod
starring Bob Hope, Jane Russell, Robert Armstrong, Iris Adrian, Bobby Watson, Jackie Searl, Joseph Vitale, Charles Trowbridge, Clem Bevans, Jeff York, Stanley Andrews, Wade Crosby, Chief Yowlachie, Iron Eyes Cody, John Maxwell, Tom Kennedy, Henry Brandon, Francis McDonald, Frank Hagney, Skelton Knaggs, Olin Howland, George Chandler, Nestor Paiva
written by Edmund L. Hartmann, Frank Tashlin, additional dialogue by Jack Rose, music by Victor Young
Paleface
review by Mike Haberfelner
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After having failed as a dentist in the Midwest, all Painless Pete (Bob
Hope) wants to do is go back East - instead he ends up married to Calamity
Jane (Jane Russell) joining a wagon train that runs right through Indian
Country. You see, Calamity Jane has become an undercover agent for the
gouvernment to find out who's selling firearms and dynamite to the
Indians, and joining a wagon train as a married woman is of course a
perfect disguise. Painless isn't cut out for a life in the West, so he
runs into a lot of trouble, including Indian attacks and shootouts and
whatnot, and the fact he doesn't even know how to fire a gun doesn't help
either, but Jane helps out where she can, and eventually he even becomes a
celebrated hero for killing 11 Indians - and then the Indians take him and
Jane captive. Somehow Painless manages to ecape though because a torture
contraption of the Indians fails to work, but since Jane has confessed
that she really has fallen in love with him (after treating him like dirt
for most of the picture), he manages to free her, blow up the Indians'
arms and dynamite, and he and Jane see to it that the gunrunners get their
just desserts, too. Not an entirely unfunny film, The
Paleface is however far from perfect: Somehow the film's plot as a
whole lacks stringency, and thus the episodes it's made of seem to
repeatedly wander off to God-knows-where, not helped by Bob Hope of
course, who treats these episodes more like comedy skits than pieces of a
whole. To be fair though, Hope is pretty funny most of the time, and he
and Jane Russell are (unsurprisingly) the major assets of this film, which
is at least amusing (as mentioned above), though not among Hope's better
ones.
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