Rediscovering an Overlooked Non-Masterpiece: ‘The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend’

The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend suffered the misfortune of being written, directed and produced by the great Preston Sturges. This meant that, when people realized it wasn’t another masterpiece like the string of films he’d created during the WWII years, it got dismissed as a misfire instead of what it was: a bright, funny western parody with a few subversive ideas.

It opens with a scene that would make the NRA — and quite a few feminists — proud. A bearded old cuss is training Freddie to be a crack shot as a series of bottles are blown off a fence. The camera pans over to reveal that Freddie is Winifred Jones, a little girl in white petticoats who’s told that a shooting iron is better for her to play with than a dolly. One transition later, the grown-up Freddie (Betty Grable) is a fancily gowned and feathered saloon gal strutting in the hoosegow after shooting a man.

A flashback explains that, like Frankie to Johnny (as that melody is played by the bar band), she thought she was shooting down her two-timing skunk of a gambling man (Cesar Romero, actually playing Hispanic and at one point speaking Spanish) when instead she shot the local judge (Porter Hall) in the fracas, which he finds most painful. It won’t be the last time he’s on her receiving end, and he generally responds with a hissed “Sh-h-h-h-h-h–” before the crowd erupts into their own chortled schticks.

Finding it wise to get out of town with best friend Conchita (Olga San Juan, another actual Hispanic playing Hispanic), Freddie boards a train with stolen luggage belonging to Swedish schoolmarm Hilda Swandumper, a typical Sturges name. “All Swedes look alike,” says Conchita.

“You must be that little Injun girl she was bringing with her,” says the conductor to Conchita, thus conveniently disguising her. “You leave Mama and Papa back home in teepee? How would you like to go see white man’s choo-choo? Puff puff engine, huh?” You can see that he looks forward to this little jaunt.

“How would you like to go suck an egg?” asks Conchita, whereupon Freddie interjects “She’s learned a little English!” Conchita will later be introduced as Consuelo (“I’m not pure”) to a landlady who declares “She’s bright for an Indian, isn’t she?” Much of the dialogue shows this awareness of patronage and solidarity among minorities and women. “I don’t care what you do to a man, but to another girl!” says Freddie to Conchita, and later the town women will all prove fair shots.

Freddie spends a lot of time “playing” the men around her, flattering their sexist assumptions. She’s inspired more or less directly by the myth of Annie Oakley, who’d been played by Barbara Stanwyck in 1936 and was currently the subject of the hit musical Annie Get Your Gun, which was being filmed with Betty Hutton for a release the following year. Both actresses had made great Sturges films. Here he works with WWII pin-up Grable, who proves perfectly game in an Oakley knock-off that eschews any sappy romantic taming of the female wildcat.

The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend anticipates a subset of ’50s westerns, starring Stanwyck and others, that center on gun-toting heroines as the cultural arc of “woman sharpshooter” evolved from comedy to western melodrama, but nobody in 1949 knew this yet. If you look into this film’s scenario deeply, which nobody did or would, it’s saying something about how women must get along at the mercy of their own resources and wits in an uncertain world. A quick draw and deadeye aim help as much as thinking on one’s feet, as demonstrated in her radical classroom scene.

Freddie makes a plea, partly to throw dust in the judge’s eyes, that “gamblers and shills and singers and things like that”, looked down upon by people of his honor’s quality, are just like everyone else. Yet this is a film in which nobody is “redeemed” or learns any lesson. They carry on, flaws and all, trapped as much in their emotional impulses as in the cross-eyed world around them.

There’s no mistaking that this is Sturges all the way through, from the richly vernacular dialogue to the operating structure of sheer chaos, as one scene after another packs the frame with a dozen characters all getting their two cents in. The almost predatory heroine, who hopes to bag a naive but rich boyfriend (Rudy Vallee), is a much more take-charge kind of gal than Hutton in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1945). She’s more like Stanwyck’s quasi-legal trickster in The Lady Eve (1941) with a dash of Claudette Colbert in The Palm Beach Story (1942).

Yet nobody in a Sturges film is ever in charge as much as they think. Thus, Freddie sails by the skin of her satins through increasingly dangerous situations that briefly toy with real tragedy until the cosmic prankster known as Fate chooses to bounce her at random into what might be a happy ending, which naturally erupts into chaos once more.

Betty Grable as Grown-up Freddie

The large cast of comic character actors includes Margaret Hamilton, El Brendel, Hugh Herbert, Sterling Holloway, Dan Jackson, Emory Parnell, Chester Conklin, Harry Hayden, Georgia Caine, Esther Howard and Marie Windsor, several of whom are known from other Sturges films. This is his first Technicolor item, and Harry Jackson’s photography is an eye-popping pleasure on this no-frills Blu-ray.

According to the American Film Institute website (reproduced on TCM’s site), Sturges had to retool the script when the Production Code office found too much sex, including the implication that the judge had been waiting an assignation with Conchita when he got shot in her room. (So that explains it.) If that wasn’t enough, 20th Century Fox’s Darryl F. Zanuck insisted on reshoots to change the ending. While some sources speculate over whether another director shot the new ending, its visual and verbal style fairly screams Sturges, even as a last-minute wrap-up.

We’ll never know what this film might have been in an earlier draft, but what we have now isn’t the disaster it’s been rated. It’s just not one of his great films, which means it’s merely an intelligently nonsensical and often funny slapstick pleasure that’s worn surprisingly well.