Parody often makes strange bedfellows, but for putting Bob Hope in the sack with Roy Rogers’s famed mount Trigger, Tashlin deserves the iconoclasm award for 1952. In a thorough milking of the Hollywood western, Trigger has all the finest anthropomorphic attributes—like brains—while our boy Roy appears as a wooden figure of a sheriff. Jane Russell burlesques Jane Russell as a saloon singer, but of course the central motif of Son of Paleface is Old Ski-Nose himself, come to Sawbuck Pass from Harvard in a ten-gallon hat to collect the fortune he thinks his father has stashed away for him. The whole would be nothing without about 2,000 Tashlinesque touches: a derisive unconcern for the laws of physics or human stamina, garish paintbox colors, and buzzards that, in the delirium of desert heat, look strangely like Martin and Lewis. “Beat it,” Hope says to them, “or you’re going to make the whole thing unbelievable.”

—Judy Bloch

• Written by Tashlin, Robert L. Welch, Joseph Quillan. Photographed by Harry J. Wild. With Bob Hope, Jane Russell, Roy Rogers, Douglass Dumbrille. (95 mins, Color, 35mm, From Sony Pictures Entertainment)