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"He won the West. Wonder if he was using loaded dice..." Dwan's Montana Belle supplies the main basis, with Jane Russell in much the same part and Roy Rogers in mud-caked fringed duds as the opposite poles of untamed California. Between them and fresh out of Harvard is the tenderfoot's son (Bob Hope), riding into town in candy-striped jacket and cap to find an empty inheritance chest and a throng of bloodthirsty creditors. The schnook and the ransacking bandit and the undercover lawman, sides of a triangle which Frank Tashlin keeps spinning like a circus plate. It's showtime at the Dirty Shame saloon and, when Junior questions the agent's indifference to Russell in opulent scarlet, the Rogers earnestness becomes a game deadpan: "I'll stick to horses, mister." (Trigger is outside, whinnying and dancing to justify the devotion.) Puttering through the desert, Hope's car comes with a couple of buzzards perched on the backseat like Heckle and Jeckle, replaced by chattering penguins after they drive through an ice-skating mirage. "Beat it, or you're gonna make the whole thing unbelievable!" Improving markedly on McLeod's original, Tashlin hits the ground running with the whole Termite Terrace panoply: Freeze-frames, asides to the camera, smoking pipes that curl and ignite like firecrackers, pinwheel spurs, soot-smeared mugs, cactus patches, the water pump that coughs dust ("Can't drink that, the glass is cracked"), sexy devil-babes, Winchesters inside guitars and banana peels under hooves. In this irresistible sagebrush jamboree, the voyeur-audience gets a keyhole-shaped burst of suds in a gag approved by Cecil B. De Mille himself. (The road to Blazing Saddles naturally includes a pit stop at Les Carabiniers.) "Let's see 'em top this on television!" With Bill Williams, Douglass Dumbrille, Lloyd Corrigan, Paul E. Burns, and Harry von Zell.
--- Fernando F. Croce |