The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend (1949).
Preston Sturges, US 1949
Print source: Museum of Modern Art, New York
Running time: 77 minutes
About the print
There is very little scratching to mar the bold colors used to create the texture and vividness of this Twentieth-Century Fox production, a beautiful Technicolor print of the late 1940s. Shrinkage: 0.80%
About the film
“The Beautiful Blonde never aims much higher than the idea that to shoot a man in the posterior is highly hilarious. They do it three times in the picture, on the theory that a good socko situation bears repetition. It’s Betty Grable who is responsible for the rear-guard action. She’s a smart-shooting babe of the Old West, whose romance with a handsome gambler is carried on to sound-track strains of Frankie and Johnny. Forced to skip town, she is taken for a school-teacher and becomes involved in another feud. Eventually, but not soon, Miss Grable wings the same character (a Judge, no less) in the same place, and the picture stops, figuring we are about helpless with laughter by now anyway.”
— Herbert Whittaker, The Globe and Mail, June 18, 1949
“After a dubiously ethical, but dramatically effective, opening, in which a small girl is taught by her grandfather that a woman’s best friend is her gun, it relapses into an outrageous and rather cruel fun fair, with all the popinjays of a backwoods town set up to be shot at. Hot Technicolor makes the actors appear to be in a constant fever; strident noise mercifully makes most of the dialogue inaudible. In a rowdy mood, it might be possible to enjoy this screaming hurly-burly, but if you are looking for wit, taste, or adroitness of performance the Odeon, Marble Arch, is hardly the right address.”
— C. A. Lejeune, The Observer, March 19, 1950