Preston Sturges is largely, and rightly, regarded as the king of screwball comedy. Alas, 1949’s The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend has a reputation which precedes it. For one thing, it was such a disaster that it nearly ended his career. The picture has had something of a critical reappraisal in decades since. Now having seen it, I’m more inclined to agree with audiences and critics in the time of its original release. This is a bad movie. Sturges goes more for slapstick than screwball and faceplants hard.
The title character is played by Betty Grable, an actress I have never found especially interesting or appealing. All I really know about her is that legendary poster that was apparently standard issues for all WWII soldiers, to give them some inspirational wank fodder. For all I know, even that bit of info might be apocryphal.
Here, Grable is a dead shot with a short temper and a hair trigger. She is also a saloon singer in the ol’ west, so imagine Yosemite Sam in a gaudy dress and without the mustache. In a moment which discards all logic, she tries to shoot Cesar Romero and his female companion in a bedroom upstairs from the saloon, instead shooting Porter Hall in the end. And I mean literally in the end–namely, Hall’s back end. She will eventually try to apologize and ends up capping his ass a second time.
She and a fellow dancer (Olga San Juan) catch the next train out of town. San Juan had taken the precaution of lifting a purse from a coffin, assuming the owner will no longer need it. The contents of that purse include train tickets that gets these two to Snake City, where Grable assumes the identity of the deceased and pretends to be the town’s newest schoolteacher. Thus a great portion of the film takes places in the schoolhouse, giving this already set-bound affair the claustrophobic feel of a one-room play.
Way too many characters pass through this set, including Rudy Vallee, wasted in a brief role as a potential suitor. Notably irritating are Sterling Holloway and Danny Jackson as hyperactive brothers who might be class clowns if anything they ever did was remotely funny. These performances are cranked up way past the limit of tolerability, and it doesn’t help that Holloway was in real-life roughly twice the maximum age his character could possibly have been.
Drama ensues when Romero, tipped off by the announcement of a reward for Grable’s arrest, follows the trail to Snake City. In a deeply stupid scene, he accidentally shoots the moronic siblings and Grable and Vallee believe they are dead. Much of the film will then play out as if those idiots are truly dead, and this is played for laughs. I was stunned at this attempt to mine the mourning of others for comic gold. Of course, it will turn out those two weren’t really killed, which was a disappointing development.
Their miraculous resurrection occurs in the middle of a huge shoot-out between two factions. Naturally, no characters are killed, though I may have been rooting for some of them to meet their maker. Unfunny gags are repeated ad nauseum, as if the audience could be bludgeoned into laughing, if only they were shown the same thing enough times. I swear some of the footage was actually looped, but I don’t care to rewatch that scene to find out.
There is very little I found to enjoy in this dire affair. San Juan has a decent, recurring shtick where she, posing as Grable’s Native American maid, gets in some cutting asides when one person after another makes the mistake of talking to her condescendingly. There’s also just some general weirdness that was intriguing, even if those moments weren’t particularly amusing. One line I doubt I will soon forget is when Grable, back when she was a little girl, is being taught how to shoot by her grandfather: “Just squeeze the trigger gently, like squeezing a sock full of dead nice.” Damn, those pioneer children had very limited resources when having to make their own toys.
I have always heard comedy is the hardest genre to do well, and The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend makes good comedies appear to be downright miraculous. Admittedly, this is about the same level of crap which many filmmakers were churning out in old Hollywood. What makes this such a travesty is that it came from Preston Sturges. Given a character will be shot in the caboose a total of three times before this wraps, one wonders what orifice Sturges pulled this from.
Dir: Preston Sturges
Starring Betty Grabel, Cesar Romero, Olga San Juan
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray