A Film Canon

This delightful parody prisms the Old West through the trail of laughing gas that rogue dentist 'Painless' Potter (Bob Hope) leaves in his wake, transforming it into a kitsch, gaudy extravaganza that never quite hides the awareness - if not the actual sensation - of grating, physical pain, nor allows its hyperbolic landscapes to escape an offbeat technological presence that is identified with sexuality, albeit more as a perverse, fetishistic potential than any discrete or conspicuous act.  Despite culminating with an extended torture sequence, this tendency is perhaps most evident in the almost painfully lurid combination of Technicolour, set and costume design, which suffuses the gender reversal endemic to the Western parody with a particularly acute camp, such that Calamity Jane's (Jane Russell) sham, pointedly unconsummated marriage to Painless, for the purpose of disguising herself as a Federal Agent, doesn't merely emasculate or infantilise him, but draws attention to the fact that his masculinity was performative in the first place. From this perspective, the humour lies less in Painless' various descents to effeminacy as in his attempts to perform his way out of them, all of which betray a five-year- old's conception of what it means to be a Western protagonist, infantilising the genre ("Anyone would have done it...anyone who was strong, courageous and a deadshot...I wonder what all the cowards are doing?") - and, more specifically, John Wayne, both in the form of a series of slightly off-kilter one-liners ("Reach you varmints...or I'll tattoo you all the hard way"), and a brilliant, exaggerated imitation of his characteristic slouch, swagger and far-reaching stare, in the midst of a crowded bar that completely precludes their panoramic aspirations.