The Paleface

Another of the type of movie that I've said I wound up with a bunch of on my DVR that I need to watch and do posts on before they expire is westerns. One that aired during Summer Under the Stars was The Paleface, so recently I finally got around to watching it.

The star being honored in conjunction with the showing I've got on my DVR is Jane Russell, who plays Calamity Jane. As the movie opens, she's in prison, but is being busted out by people not known to her, and who force her to go with them. (Coincidentally, another western on my DVR that I'm going to be writing a post on before the recording expires has the same theme, Gunfight at Comanche Creek, although the breakouts in that movie are done for a different reason.) The men who break Jane out take her to the territorial governor Johnson, who offers her a bargain. Somebody is smuggling weapons to the Indians, who are obviously using them to attack settlers. If Jane can figure out who, the governor will give her a full pardon. Jane being a woman would be less likely to be suspected of being an agent of the government.

The plan is to have Jane go to a town called Port Deerfield, where she'll meet up with her contact from the feds. She'll pose as the guy's husband and the two will join a wagon train to their ultimate destination, Buffalo Flats. But Jane gets to Port Deerfield and finds that the federal agent she's supposed to work with has been discovered and killed. Worse, she realizes that the men who killed the agent are hot on her trail and coming after her, so she needs to get away, but how?

Also in Port Deerfield, and decidedly not part of the gang of men running guns to the Indians or trying to kill Jane is Painless Pete Potter (Bob Hope). Potter is an itinerant dentist who goes from one town to the next to provide dental work. Except that this being a character played by Bob Hope, Potter isn't the most competent denitst, which I suppose is part of why he has to go from one town to the next. His makeshift office is on the ground floor of a building that houses baths for women on the upper floor, which is how Potter and Jane wind up in the same building together, and then wind up in the same wagon when Jane has to jump from the balcony to escape the gunmen coming after her at the same time Potter is escaping irate patients.

They have a pretend marriage, and join the wagon train, but since Potter isn't good at that either they lead a bunch of wagons off course to spend a night at a cabin in an isolated part of the countryside where a group of Indians can attack. Unbeknownst to Potter, who doesn't know that he's with Calamity Jane or that she's working with the feds to stop gun-running, Jane helps repel an Indian attack while making it look like Potter is responsible for stopping them and thus a hero. It serves Jane's plans, as if the gunmen think Potter is the fed they won't suspect her, although of course this puts Potter into danger which is a bit of a problem from a Production Code point of view.

So eventually Jane has to kinda, sorta let Potter in on what's going on, which is also in part because she needs his help. The two both get captured by the Indians, but you know that this is the sort of movie that's going to have a happy ending.

If you've seen any of Hope's comedies from the 1940s, and I've reviewed several of them here, you'll know what your in for with The Paleface. The surprise here is Jane Russell, early in her career since Howard Hughes didn't use her much in the 1940s. She shows herself to be extremely adept at doing comedy with Bob Hope, and the screenplay, while not particularly realist, is simply a lot of escapist fun. The movie also won an Oscar for introducing the song "Buttons and Bows".