The Paleface (1948)

The joke about the greenhorn who goes West and gets confused for an authentic gunslinger because someone else is doing the shooting for him was popular in Hollywood for a while.

Famously, Abbot & Costello’s The Wistful Widow of Wagon Gap (1947) used it just one year earlier; as did the Don Knotts remake The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968.)

In this earlier version Peter "Painless" Potter (Bob Hope) is a Washington dentist who goes West only to immediate want to return home when his ineptitude is discovered. (Cantinflas was to play a Western dentist two decades later in Por Mis Pistolas (1968).)

In the meantime, Calamity Jane (Jane Russell) is busted from jail and recruited by the government to discover the identity of the White traders selling guns to the Indians, and she adopts Hope (unbeknownst to him) to fill in when her would be partner is found dead.

Some gags feature very minor surrealism (the 'Crack of Dawn' title cracks, for example,) but other than minor gags there is no fantastic content other than a draw-and-quarter execution which results in Hope being flung a mile into the air with no resulting injury.

Many old Westerns have become problematic due to their portrayal of Native Americans and this one (with a pile of eleven dead bodies at one point) is no exception; add to that that since the Indian revolt is given no context, we are supposed to automatically side with the Europeans, (could it be that the Indians might have a justifiable reason to revolt? Of course not!)

Unlike early Hope roles where he actually is heroic, he is already into his well-established coward persona.

If you can overlook the dismissive attitude toward native cultures this is a perfectly fine Bob Hope Comedy.

Directed by Norman Z. McLeod; with Robert Armstrong, Iris Adrian, Bobby Watson, Jackie Searl, Iron Eyes Cody & Skelton Knaggs.

Featuring the song Buttons and Bows