THE BEAUTIFUL BLONDE FROM BASHFUL BEND
A film review by Allan Toombs
Copyright 1996 Allan Toombs
This may be old hat to the rest of the world but here in the UK Channel Four is running a series of Betty Grable musicals and this is one I've never seen before, perhaps because it's raucous and rollicking tone may have offended the tastes of past British film buyers. Frankly I found Betty Grable a breath of fresh air, resplendant in the technicolour of this hi-budget, low brow, comedy Western. Much is made of the comic talents of Marilyn Munroe or Doris Day yet Betty Grable appears to have been overlooked. In this wonderfully stupid film she's ballsy, brash and looks like she enjoyed every minute.
The comedy arises from her arrival in a frontier town where the dialectic between a new conservative class and an original rootin' shootin' underclass is all too familiar. Betty plays a saloon-bar entertainer who sings and does a trick shooting act. Yet through a comedy of assumptions she is taken to be the new school mistress. She has to tame two hillbilly boys whose sheer goofiness prefigures Beevis and Butthead. Ms.Grable controls every scene she's in and brings the dopey twosome under her power by adapting her handgun routine hilariously. A running gag throughout the picture is her uncanny knack of shooting the town judge in the posterior and much juvenile humour is generated from this which Betty just laps up.
However the film rarely stops for breath and pitches into a slapstick gunfight with Betty at it's heart smashing, throwing, and shooting for all she's worth. The history book on female comedy needs rewriting if the name Grable isn't up there with the likes of Sally Fields. Gorgeous, vivacious and crude, this could be a cult classic of unintentional camp. Take your brain out of gear and it's great stuff.
Allan Toombs http://www.cityscape.co.uk/users/bt18/atoombs.html mailto:toombs@cityscape.co.uk
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