Bela e Bandida

To begin with, it looks awful. A previous reviewer wrote that it is colorized. This is inaccurate. It's shot in some ghastly process known as TruColor that renders the blues and reds into a hideous aqua marine/pink tint so that it resembles some kind of a western mermaid flic. Second, the acting sucks. I generally like George Brent but here he is not so much phoning it in as, to employ a stereotypical Native American analogy appropriate to this racist film, smoke signaling it in. And Jane Russell has rarely been this bland. As for the story and screenplay it is overly complicated, with three men in love with the title character and two competing gangs of outlaws, and under written with only one of the three male pursuers given a personality (for the record, that'd be Forrest Tucker who delivers the only interesting performance). Add the above mentioned bigotry, with the white characters making fun of the lone native American (played by a Caucasian actor, natch) for his poor English, and set the whole thing in the mountains, pine forests and birch forests of...Oklahoma!...and you end up with one lousy, dumb ass movie. C minus.

PS...All my auteurist friends tell me that Alan Dwan is a great film maker. Based on this, which is admittedly the only Dwan western I've seen, the guy's not fit to hold Boetticher's view finder.

This horrifically bad movie would be less laughable if they had taken the time to shoot on location that did not betray the Sierra Mountain range in the background, despite supposedly taking place in Oklahoma. Also on full display way too often is Jane Russell's block chin and vulgar underbite. Film making 101 states to NEVER reveal your star's bad angles.

Jane Russell, in a modest performance, is cast as the West's most notorious female outlaw, a role previously played on screen by Gene Tierney in "Belle Starr" in 1941 and by Isabel Jewell in "Badman's Territory" in 1946... Director Allan Dwan could not take any interest into the unworthy storyline or the determinedly pedestrian cast... In addition, the harsh colors are no asset to the proceedings...

Belle Starr (Russell), an outlaw's widow has a misunderstanding with Scott Brady and the three outlaw Dalton Brothers... She joins with Forrest Tucker and Jack Lambert in a holdup rampage, gaining an even more unpleasant reputation... Later she returns to her old favorite place of resort disguised sufficiently so that no one recognizes her...

Because gambler-saloonkeeper George Brent has $50,000 in funds that Jane is longing to gain, she persuades him to take her as a partner at his saloon... As the new presiding mistress of the establishment, Jane finds time to sing "The Gilded Lily" and to understand that Brent is basically a good guy after all, even though he is determined on bringing the Dalton gang and Belle Starr to justice...

Jane Russell plays a (very) fictionalized Belle Starr. (Going off contemporary photographs the real Belle Starr looked closer to Ernest Borgnine), also Jane gets away with being disguised as a man during a holdup!! You can see we are not talking reality here.

Originally filmed in color, most prints now available are black and white. Jane does a couple of not bad (and rather racy) musical numbers that are a little out of place and appeared to have filmed at a different time. It seems as though cuts may have been as the plot gets a little muddled sometimes and now and again we get the impression we are entering scenes in progress.

After completion this movie was held up for a few years before distribution, which is usually a bad sign. In this case though it seems no worse than many of the second string westerns produced in the forties.

Okay with popcorn and if you're in the right mood.

Belle Starr (Jane Russell) gets saved by Bob Dalton (Scott Brady) and joins the Dalton gang. Saloon owner Tom Bradfield (George Brent) falls for her when she takes on the alias Montana Belle. He and others are plotting to take down the Dalton gang.

Belle Starr was a real person who was associated with the James-Younger Gang and others. This movie barely recognizes the truth. At first, I am intrigued with Jane Russell doing the rough horse riding bandit, but she is not doing much more than fill out the outfit. Then her character turns into a blonde bombshell. This is a messy melodrama inside of a B-western. I was hoping for a big action stunt scene to save this. At last, it ends with some shooting and not much else.