The Paleface (Paramount, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, September 6) my husband Charles and I watched two features on Turner Classic Movies as well as an intervening short. The features were The Paleface (1948), a comedy Western directed by Norman Z. McLeod (who’d already made his comedy “bones” by directing two Marx Brothers movies, 1931’s Monkey Business and 1932’s Horse Feathers, and was just coming off his 1947 hit The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, produced by Samuel Goldwyn and starring Danny Kaye, Virginia Mayo, and Boris Karloff) and starring Bob Hope as an aspiring dentist from Washington, D.C. named “Painless” Peter Potter who for some reason has decided to migrate West to ply his trade. The first 20 minutes or so of the film are deadly serious, as two men break Calamity Jane (Jane Russell) out of jail and take her to the state’s governor, where she’s offered a full pardon (we’re not told for what) if she’ll infiltrate a wagon train to find out who in it is selling rifles and sticks of dynamite to the Native American tribes along the way. To travel with the wagon train she needs a man to accompany her, and when the original man who was supposed to take that role is found dead in his law office, Jane reluctantly drafts dentist Potter to marry her so she can commandeer his wagon and join the train. Along the way they’re attacked by Indians, and like Mae West in My Little Chickadee (1940) Jane takes out enough of the Indians attacking them that the remainder of the tribes call a halt to the assault and withdraw. Also, like W. C. Fields in My Little Chickadee, Potter takes credit for Jane’s exploits and is acclaimed a hero when they get to the nearest town. The script for The Paleface was written by Edmund L. Hartmann and Frank Tashlin, with Jack Rose credited with additional dialogue and, as usual, three of Hope’s radio writers, Melville Shavelson, Monte Brice, and Barney Dean, supplying uncredited gag lines.

The problem is that The Paleface, though it was an enormous box-office hit at the time (it was reportedly the most popular comedy Western until Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles from 1974, which TCM actually double-billed with it), really dates pretty badly. I wasn’t that amused by the opening gag in which Potter is accosted by one unsatisfied customer as he’s working on another and he ends up pulling the wrong tooth, the one that already has a gold filling. I also think the gags about Native Americans as stupid, violence-prone savages get wearing after a while (even though two actual Natives, Chief Yowlatchie and Iron Eyes Cody, appear in the film as rival chiefs), especially when they threaten to burn Our Hero and Our Heroine at the stake at the end. The bad guys are led by Terris (Robert Armstrong, wasted as usual) and there’s such a conflation of them, both white and Native, it gets pretty hard to keep track of everybody after a while. One bizarre scene is that in which “B”-girl and saloon singer Pepper (Iris Adrian) tries to vamp Potter away from Jane – easier than it sounds because Jane has temporarily broken up with him – does a number called “Meetcha ’Round the Corner” in which she’s voice-doubled by jazz singer Annette Warren (three years before she doubled for Ava Gardner in the 1951 film Show Boat). The whole acoustic changes so dramatically before the song begins it’s all too obvious the voice is being dubbed.

The big song from the film is “Buttons and Bows,” a hit at the time for Dinah Shore (YouTube has her record of it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfW9-0EzYxA&list=RDjfW9-0EzYxA&start_radio=1 and there’s also a 1988 clip by Bob Hope and Dolly Parton at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjn1OYu32J8 that’s considerably funnier than the one in the film itself, especially with the cross-dressing jokes and references to David Bowie and Boy George). The song is sung by Bob Hope in the film, which makes little sense because the lyric was obviously written for a woman (“My clothes denounce the buckboard’s bounce/And the cactus hurts my toes”), and that also denies us the chance to hear Jane Russell’s quite serviceable voice. The Paleface kept reminding me of other, better movies both before and after, not only My Little Chickadee but also Blood on the Moon (not a comedy but which also featured a distaff gunslinger), and it creaked to a close despite some good stunt work by doubles for both Hope and Russell as they manage to escape being burned at the stake by the Natives and bust local undertaker Jonathan Sloane (Olin Howard), who it turns out is the brains behind the scheme to sell rifles and dynamite to the Natives. James Agee invidiously cited the scene in The Paleface in which Potter and one of the town’s nastiest and most lethal gunslingers stalk each other through the deserted village streets and keep missing each other. In his article on silent comedy he compared this to Buster Keaton’s similar scene in The Navigator (only in Keaton’s case it was the leading lady, not the villain, whom he kept missing by inches) and said that at the climax of the scene in The Paleface director McLeod made the mistake of cutting to Jane Russell. That actually made sense in the movie, since the gimmick is that Russell, a crack shot, picked off the villain and thereby saved Hope’s life – eerily anticipating the scene 14 years later that provides the climax for John Ford’s late masterpiece The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), when James Stewart’s character learns that it was really John Wayne’s who shot the psychopathic title villain played by Lee Marvin.

Jane Russell liked making The Paleface because it was her third film, and her first under normal production conditions. She’d made her debut under the mercurial Howard Hughes in The Outlaw, who fired his original director, Howard Hawks, and took over himself. Then he loaned her to independent producer Hunt Stromberg for a film called Young Widow, of which Russell later said, “She should have died with her husband.” For The Paleface she was at least working under a major studio with a veteran director, Norman McLeod, who was allowed to make the film without constant second-guessing from the Paramount bosses. One person connected with The Paleface who didn’t like McLeod so much was the film’s co-writer, Frank Tashlin, who’d grown up watching the Laurel and Hardy movies and got his start in the Warner Bros. cartoon department making shorts starring Porky Pig. He raided his memories of the Laurel and Hardy shorts for gags for his animated films, and when he graduated to live action he “made his bones” with cartoon-like gags like the one in which he introduced Harpo Marx in the late Marx Brothers movie A Night in Casablanca (1946). Harpo is leaning against a building when a cop comes up to him and sarcastically asks, “What are you doing – holding up the building?” Then the cop pulls him away – and the building falls. Tashlin was so appalled at what McLeod had done to his script that, like Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder with Mitchell Leisen before him, he demanded and got the right to direct films himself, including the sequel to The Paleface, Son of Paleface (1952), in which Hope appeared as the son of his and Jane Russell’s characters in The Paleface while Russell rejoined the cast as someone completely different. The best aspect of The Paleface is the absolute seriousness with which Russell plays her character. One of the great ironies about Russell is that, despite the enormous breasts that won her the attention of Howard Hughes and got her the part in The Outlaw, her hard face and muscular body made her look surprisingly masculine. When she co-starred with Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) – for which, as a condition set by Howard Hughes for loaning her out, she got top billing – in their scenes together they look like a Lesbian couple, with Russell the butch and Marilyn the femme. The Paleface seems like a bundle of missed opportunities, and it wasn’t that Bob Hope couldn’t handle a period piece; four years earlier he’d made another Technicolor extravaganza, The Princess and the Pirate, which was even farther from his wheelbase than The Paleface but was a considerably funnier film.