Bela e Bandida

Here's an odd one: sexy Jane Russell as western sharp-shooter Belle Starr, here competing with rivals The Dalton Gang. Movie opens with fruity bravado, but don't expect a camp-fest. Things gets surprisingly serious in the film's second-half, leading to a curiously downbeat conclusion. Very strange, and not particularly successful. Worth a look for the curio value alone. Supporting players George Brent and Forrest Tucker take turns getting out of Jane's way; Russell poses, pouts and scowls as Belle, her high-point coming in a crowded saloon where she warbles "The Gilded Lily". ** from ****

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.

Montana Belle which probably at best started out to be an average B western product from RKO got to Howard Hughes's attention because it starred his protégé Jane Russell. This make believe account of the famous female outlaw Belle Starr got cut and recut and edited down to a mess of a story if you're looking for coherency. The film was made in 1948 and released in 1952 and that's always bad news.

Like Jane's first feature, The Outlaw, certain western legends who never in real life met up with each other, have dealings in the Hollywood west. In The Outlaw, it's the Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid story rewritten to have Doc Holiday's participation. In Montana Belle, Jane as Belle Starr is rescued by Bob Dalton played by Scott Brady. But later when she mistakes a doublecross she forms her own gang with Forrest Tucker and Jack Lambert as a most stereotypical Indian.

In the meantime another guy with his hormones in a tizzy over Jane's titanic weaponry is George Brent, gentleman gambler and owner of the largest liquor&gaming establishment in Guthrie, Oklahoma. He's going to reform Jane and separate her from her disreputable outlaw companions. Nice work if you can get it.

You can't say too much about the story, Howard Hughes muddled this one, the same as he muddled, The Outlaw, Jet Pilot, and My Forbidden Past. One thing he didn't do for which we can thank the Deity is that he didn't cut Jane's number, The Gilded Lily from the film. It's definitely the best thing about Montana Belle.

But over at Republic they were shooting westerns with all their B stars that had more coherent plots than you see here.

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.