The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend

Shortly before "Anne Get Your Gun" was released, this film, which I dub "Betty, Get Your Gun" was released, as an often raucous western comedy, starring Betty Grable and Cesar Romero. But, sometimes the duo of Sterling Holloway and Dan Jackson, as the demented Basserman boys, take center stage. They have a penchant for spying on Betty, and acting up in her class or elsewhere. Porter Hall is perfect as the harried Judge O'Toole: the unlucky recipient of 3 bullets from Betty's gun, in a running gag sequence, that lodge in the least damaging place: his buttocks. Hugh Herbert is perfect as the eccentric doctor who pulls these slugs out. Rudy Vallee plays a dapper wealthy bachelor, who owns a gold mine, and competes with Cesar for Betty's heart. Cesar is a handsome rogue who has a love-hate relationship with Betty. .......During the credits, and at the end, the peppy title song is sung. Rather early on, onstage, Betty sings the melodious "Every Time I meet You", accompanied by a barbershop quartet. This was composed by Josef Myrow and Mack Gordon. Later, in a private setting, Rude Vallee, along with Betty, sing the standard "In the Gloming"......The silliness occasionally gets out of hand, but on the whole I liked it. See this short second feature film at YouTube.

When you hear the name Preston Sturges you expect great things, but this isn't one of his best efforts. Yes, for the gentlemen viewer it has Betty Grable in a range of corsets playing a pseudo Annie Oakley, and for the ladies it has Rudy Vallee (admittedly rather past his prime). For comedy value it has the peerless Sterling Holloway, but this isn't his finest hour.

Plotwise there isn't much here. Grable has an on-off relationship with Cesar Romero which sometimes causes her to go off toting a gun. Twice in a row Porter Hall's judge is in the way, and off she goes on the run with her Mexican friend to impersonate a schoolteacher. And that's it.

There's a couple of songs, but Grable and Vallee's musical talents are wasted and the only real pull of this film is the fact it is in Technicolor. Given the number of second-rate features which were at the time this was made, that's no draw. And even Grable misses her target here.

I have loved this movie ever since I was a child. The slapstick comedy never gets old.

If you look at Preston Sturges' "Miracle at Morgan's Creek," 1943, staring Betty Hutton as Judy Kockenlocker, you will see how incredibly perverse it was considering the moral standards in the movie industry at the time. You have a movie suggesting that a woman getting drunk and sleeping with a soldier and becoming pregnant without even remembering his name was a hilarious situation. Sturges took delight in repeating her name over and over again, obviously finding it hilarious that it sounded like the painful situation of a "cock-in-locker." This movie is just as hilarious with its outrageous humor, having multiple and deliberate jokes about a judge who gets shot in his buttocks.

Unfortunately, this film came out in 1949, the year that produced the most film noirs and a year where Congressional investigations into Hollywood political transgressions were taking a horribly serious turn.

One can see this film and Preston Sturges as being the victim of the new politics of the time.

Betty Grable looks sexy in every scene and often adjusts her clothes (taking them on or off) to look even more sexy. Her blatant sexuality comes through in the metaphor of her being able to handle a gun better than any of the men in the picture. Never has the penis/gun equation been more straight forward.

If this movie had come out in 1944 or 1954, it would have been hailed as a masterpiece, but in 1949, the U. S. was preparing for a new world war which was expected to be a lot worse than the last one. The last thing the government (issuing daily warnings about impending world war wanted was an outrageous sex comedy filled with double and triple entendres like this film.

Don't miss it, especially if you are a Preston Sturges or Betty Grable fans. Fans of 1930s and 40s comedies will be happy to see at least half a dozen minor comedy stars, like Hugh Herbert, El Brendel, Sterling Holloway, and Porter Hall, plying their trade with obvious skill and joy,

I came onto this film as one of a large purchased collection, and after reading a batch of reviews on various film sites didn't expect much from it; there were numerous citings that it was perhaps Grable's worst film, that it wasn't vintage Sturges, that it was loud farce devoid of virtues except for an expert use of full Technicolor.

And color it has, And it is a loud farce. But although it completely lacks the soft focus turn of the century costumer that Grable so often appeared it, and barely gives the viewer time to absorb the nutty humor, Beautiful Blonde, from it's initial scenes with Grandpa Russell Simpson teaching his little curly-haired granddaughter to reduce bottles to smithereens with a careful aim to the last mad gunfight, a loud and vulgar and often screamingly funny parody of dozens of final shoot-outs in hundreds of western hero epics, this film exudes a sense of madness, of a cast nearly out of control in the spirit of farce.

One critic mentions how often Olga San Juan as "Conchita" the dark- skinned servant, is insulted—but failed to remark on her hilarious comebacks, a few surely cut off mid-sentence by censorship concerns. If a careful viewer listens carefully (often hard to do in this raucous unendingly noisy film), there are ample double-entendres as well as the beginnings of a limerick that rhymes with "Nantucket." Surely most alert viewers will fill in the blank. This film demands your attention, and if you do not have the patience for noise and chaos as part of your experience, you may actively dislike it.

Grable seems to be having a great time, especially as the substitute teacher with a golden gun, confronted by a pair of demented youths out of some clueless Beavis-world, one an off-the-wall Sterling Holloway. And the film is certainly worth watching just to see so many familiar character actors taking full advantage of their few lines—whether it's Margaret Hamilton, Hugh Herbert or for a brief moment, Marie Windsor in full-on scarlet feather drag—the film is so short, so fast-paced, that co-star Cesar Romero almost seems insignificant, and seems to be plot window-dressing. Which he is!

Of course this is no Palm Beach Story, that brilliant farce about romance and love and money: nor has it the zany coherence of The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. But it reflects the scattershot, nutty world that Sturges created so often, and seems like his final party before the silence descended--and you are invited.