A real dud
A lifelong fan of Randolph Scott
Westerns, your Jeff finds it difficult to find much positive to say about Randy's
mid-40s RKO effort, Belle of the Yukon.
It’s probably alright if you like musical screwball comedies. Is that positive
enough?
There’s an amusing intro, which augurs
well:
If it’s blood
you want
And cold you
want
And the call
of the Klondike night
If it’s mud
you want
And gold you
want
Or what Robert
Service would write…
You’re in the’
wrong theater, brother!
But that’s about as good as it gets.
Scott (left) was very popular, though he always
only seemed to get the lead in B-pictures or back up top stars in A-ones. Two
Westerns before, in 1942, he had supported John Wayne in the rollicking and
successful The Spoilers, and perhaps
he thought that another Alaska tale would hit the spot in ’44. But it was a
flaccid dud.
Part of the fault lies with his co-star, Gypsy
Rose Lee. The burlesque artist (let’s be polite and call her that) was not a
good movie actress and seen today she reminds me chiefly of Boy George in
looks. The character she plays is also unsympathetic – arrogant and egocentric.
She only has one song, ingénue Dinah Shore taking the lion’s share of the
tonsil-work. Shore’s songs Sleigh Ride in July and Like Someone in Love had, as
Bosley Crowther in The New York Times
put it, “a vogue on the radio”. They come across now as very 1940s-schmaltzy
indeed.
Boy George Gypsy Rose Lee
It’s too complex a story to tell here, and I
haven’t the patience. Suffice to say that it involves romance, bank robbery and
skullduggery in and around the fancy Klondike saloon owned by Honest John
Calhoun (Scott). The saloon provides the context for the songs, though
fortunately there are only four.
Scott went through the motions. Probably the
best part was that of Guinn ‘Big Boy’ Williams (below, in a studio publicity shot) as the crooked and lazy town marshal.
Williams was usually entertaining and had quite a gift for comedy. The role,
though, would have ideally suited Edgar Buchanan.
It’s all in bright Technicolor, shot by Ray
Rennahan, though there are almost no location shots, the action being largely
confined to the studio-built saloon interior.
Shore and Marshall, rather less than stunning
Bob Burns as a visiting conman and Charles
Winninger as Calhoun’s saloon manager and father of the Shore character both
ham it up too much, going for slapstick. William Marshall as Shore’s paramour
is bland to the point of the glacial. ‘Below the line’, often uncredited, you
get the likes of Hank Bell as a barman, and Kermit Maynard and Jack Perrin as
saloon patrons, but you only fleetingly spot them.
The whole shebang was directed by William A
Seiter (amusing photo, right), a Keystone vet who found fame directing such acts as the Marx brothers,
Abbott & Costello and Laurel & Hardy. You wouldn’t really think so,
though, while watching Belle of the Yukon.
It all rather falls flat. He had directed Scott in a (non-Western) musical
comedy back in ’33, Hello Everybody!,
but that was no better.
Bizarrely, James Edward Grant wrote it. Again,
you would never have guessed. Wayne pal Grant was capable of classy work such
as Hondo, Angel and the Badman and The Sheepman.
In fact, it’s hardly a Western at all. No gun
is fired, for example. Sad to give a Randolph Scott picture only a one-revolver rating,
but it doesn’t deserve more.