30 Years of Brilliance: 1930-1959
Jane Russell and Bob Hope
'The Paleface' is a comedy movie, and Western parody made in 1948, directed by Norman Z McLeod, and starring Bob Hope and Jane Russell. It was the highest grossing movie that Bob Hope made in his career. The film is notable for the song 'Buttons and Bows', sung by Hope, which won the Academy Award for Best Song.
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Jane Russell plays the gunslinging Calamity Jane, recruited by the US government to help track down a gang of renegade whites who are selling guns to the Indians. In order to pose as an emigrant on a wagon train going West she marries Painless Peter Potter, an incompetent and cowardly dentist she encounters in a bathhouse - one doesn't look for plausiblity in such material. As Painless, Bob Hope has a wonderful time, letting forth a fusilade of jokes on the principle that if you didn't like this one, there will be another one along in a minute. " Help, help, there's a million Indians out here against one coward!"
Much of the humor in 'The Paleface' is along predictable lines with Indians inhaling the dentist's laughing gas and Hope performing all manner of unheroics, leading to his being mistaken for a courageous Indian fighter thanks to Jane's sharpshooting. Hope is of course madly attracted to the curvaceous Russell - "You've got just the kind of mouth I like to work on." There's a running joke about the endlessly postponed consummation of the marriage as Russell gets on with the job of defeating the bad guys.
Painless and Calamity are captured and taken to an Indian camp, where Indians are played both by Chief Yowlachie, (a genuine Native American) and by Iron Eyes Cody (an Italian-American who passed as a Native American). The comedy at their expense, though hardly politically correct, is too silly to give serious offense.
Hope gives a pleasing rendition of the song 'Buttons and Bows', written by Victor Young, which won an Oscar. It's a plea for girls to go back East and wear pretty clothes, but Russell looks equally fetching in satin dresses and buckskin pants. Four years later 'Buttons and Bows' was repeated in a sequel, titled 'Son of Paleface', (directed by the writer of 'The Paleface', Frank Tashlin). Hope and Russell are reunited, this time supported by Roy Rogers, and his horse Trigger, who gets a song of his own, 'A Four Legged Friend'.
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