The Paleface Review
The great civic historian Otto Friedrich, in his study of Los Angeles in the 1940's, made a stunningly accurate analysis on the films of Bob Hope. All of Hope's movies, he wrote, revolve around the same three basic gags: the size of his nose, his innate cowardliness, and his complete ineptitude with women. With the exception of the ski beak, these truths are self-evident in The Paleface. Featuring an extremely attractive Jane Russell as Calamity Jane, the thin plot revolves around an undercover operation to discover who is selling guns to Indians. Jane agrees to pose as the wife of a government agent in exchange for a pardon, but through a series of mishaps must dupe Hope's eastern dentist into marrying her so she can secretly prop him up as an agent. All that is really besides the point, since the plot allows Hope to essentially play his typical role and provides all sorts of instances where he can be a coward and a frustrated lover. The major plot points are as predictable as they come, but it doesn't really matter. The jokes are for the most part typically funny material, especially the climax in the Indian camp where Hope disguises himself as the medicine man, and Russell has probably not looked better on screen with perhaps one or two exceptions. The script was co-written by Frank Tashlin, who would go on to become a well-known director and, in fact, directed the sequel Son of Paleface when he felt the director Norman Z. McLeod had not handled the original to his liking. Dan Friedman, Rovi
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