|
Son of PalefaceRating:
Release Date: 21 November, 2000 Retail Price: $9.99 OUR Price: $9.99 You SAVE: $0.00! Cast: Complete Cast (10 total) |
Son of Paleface Reviews
Hope at his Best!
Quite seriously (in a manner of speaking!) this is the best of all of Bob Hope's movies. Although the Road To.. films are classics and will forever feature in the Comedy Hall of Fame, this little-known gem is a real riot! This probably comes closest to Road to Utopia in terms of zaniness.
A sequel-of-sorts to the hugely inferior The Paleface, this movie lays it's cards on the table from the very beginning as we are introduced to the titular 'hero' through a very witty narration ("This girl has just the kind of lips I like to kiss - one on top and one on the bottom") that includes the almost obligatory Bing Crosby cameo. Following this is a few minutes of plot development (and, strangely, this film has more plot than most straight westerns) before Junior Potter (Hope) bursts into town. Great one-liners abound ("I'm an innocent man and if you have any justice in you, you'll accept my bribe") but the real beauty of the film is the surreal, almost cartoon-like direction. Of course the direction has every right to be cartoon-like - it's directed by Frank Tashlin who started in Hollywood directing Porky Pig! Wild action includes Hope's reaction to a Micky Finn, Hope's attempts to blend in with his cowboy costume, Hope and Trigger sharing a bed and talk (tastefully done!) and a crazy chase finale involving banana skins!
Supporting players Jane Russell, Roy Rogers and, of course, Trigger do extremely well in the shadow of Hope who pulls out all of the stops for a career-best performance. The songs, including Buttons and Bows with a twist, are great and the script, apart from the few straight seems which are kept to a minimum, compares well with the Marx Brothers at their best.
Don't believe me - watch it and see for yourself!
Son of Paleface
SON OF PALEFACE is a sequel, of sorts, to Bob Hope's 1948 hit PALEFACE. It reunites Hope with Jane Russell (Calamity Jane in the previous movie, Mike 'The Torch' Delroy in this one.) Singing cowboy Roy Rogers rounds out the lead roster as Federal Agent Roy Barton.
Hope plays Peter 'Junior' Potter Jr., a recent Harvard grad who travels west to claim his inheritance. Russell plays a masked bandit and Rogers the Fed investigating a series of stagecoach holdups. There's a search for a cache of gold hidden by Junior's father but beyond that the plot doesn't get in the way much at all. If it did, you'd wonder how the masked Torch is able to keep her identity a secret. Yeah, she's wearing a mask, but the hip-hugging jeans and tight blouse she wears when a-robbing make it kind of obvious who it is under the mask.
Not that it matters much. The plot is just thick enough, thank you. Russell and Rogers play it straight and provide Hope with strong foils to play against. By 1952, when SON OF PALEFACE was made, Bob Hope had the blustering coward schtick down cold. Teamed here was director and former Warner Brothers animator Frank Tashlin things get a little wacky. Non sequiturs, snappy one-liners and mugging close-ups are the rule here. Tashlin throws in some very cartoon-y gags, as well. Hope drinks an impossibly tall drink in a bar. After a moment the pipe he's smoking straightens out and spits fire. The H on his Harvard shirt curls. The pipe curls and his nose is caught in the bowl. Smoke hisses out of Hope's ears. His head spins rapidly, then his body. His head sinks into his coat and his hat covers the neck hole. Russell lifts the hat and peeks in....
You get the idea. It's all good family fun with just a scene or two that might zoom past the uninitiated. For instance, when Hope drives his roadster across the desert two vultures perch on the rumble seat. At one point Hope turns on them and says "Hey! Martin and Lewis! Beat it!" Fortunately, the visual and verbal gags come at such a rapid-fire rate we aren't forced to mull over such mysterious references. Before we're given a chance to think about it Hope has driven through an ice-rink desert mirage and the vultures have changed into penguins.
SON OF PALEFACE is one of those rare movies that will appeal to almost everybody and offend almost nobody.
More Customer Reviews (12 total)
You like Son of Paleface?
|
