SON OF PALEFACE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 724, 29 May 1953, Page 20

SON OF PALEFACE

(Paramount) S one of Hollywood's few surviving comedians big ‘enough to pick his own winners, Bob Hope has chosen what looks like sure-fire material for his latest burlesque. In The Paleface he played a dude who went West and bamboozled the cowboys and Indians into thinking him something of a hero. Son of Paleface gives us another load of the same Hopus-pocus, in which Hope goes West again as a Harvard undergraduate seeking the lost fortune which his old man left to him before passing in his checks. He arrives at the town of Sawbuck Pass right in the middle of an old-fashioned plot involving a mysterious desperado called The Torch (Jane Russell), who goes around robbing mail coaches, and a disguised federal agent (Roy Rogers) riding a remarkably intelligent ‘horse (Trigger). Hope and his scarlet Model T Ford have no sooner bounced dustily into town than they become the centre of interest between the bandits and the law. At the Dirty Shame saloon, where The Torch sings and dances away the hours when she is not cafeering across the desert with a six-shooter on each hip, he is given a doped drink by the lady (at a private party in her room) so that she can slip away through a secret passage on another raid. But singing Roy Rogers, with a Winchester hidden inside his guitar, has marked her horse so he can trace its hoof-prints. Meantime, Paleface’s son is also being pursued by a posse of angry creditors anxious to get back the money which his father owed when he died, and that money is hidden inside a stuffed moose head in the ghost town of Sterling City, in the middle of Indian territory. Hope and his vintagé limousine finally get on the trail of the gold, and together with Rogers and Jane Russell are trapped by the Indians in the ghost town. Everything is solved in somewhat haphazard fashion, and the film ends with its best sequence, a long chase across. the desert with Bob and Jane driving the car (equipped with waggon wheels instead of tyres) and a band of whooping Indians shooting arrows up the exhaust pipe. Altogether, Hope's wisecracks, pratfalls, and generally nonsensical. behaviour are pretty much on the juvenile side, and Son of Paleface seems to be aimed more at Saturday afternoon crowds than mature audiences. But if you like Hope’s particular brand of humour, which hasn’t changed much over the years, you will enjoy this one, and of course Jane Russell is an added attraction-very much so.