The Road to Son of Paleface, 3

Well, you know, I spent a long time doing cartoons. Finally, I just lost interest in it. So I thought — what can I do? Be an agent, a gagman, a writer. I went into writing. Then, a few years later, I wrote a picture called The Paleface. After seeing the preview of it, I could've shot Norman McLeod. I'd written it as a satire on The Virginian, and it was completely botched. I could've killed that guy. And I realized then that I must direct my own stuff.

- Frank Tashlin, interview with Peter Bogdanovich, 1962

I've seen no information on Son of Paleface's production aside from the none-too-convincing publicity photo caption on the right. The script's progress, however, is documented at the Academy library.

As intellectual property, the "original story" Robert L. Welch registered in early March, 1951 compares well to most software patents. It can be summarized as "Paleface was a hit, My Little Chickadee had a plot, and Roy Rogers is available."

In late April, Welch and Joseph Quillan delivered a bulkier treatment. Their mish-mash of received storylines now included one which made it to the finished product — the local Native American community's thirst for vengeance — although it speaks well for Hollywood quality control that such proposed character names as "Chief Yellow Feather" and "Little Big Horn" were dropped. At this point the comedy is stocked with sure-fire laugh-getters like stranglings, knifings, and a bent shotgun shooting injuns over the shoulder. Even so, the authors' invention flagged: at the end there's a big chase, and "Then Bob Hope leaves for a series of personal appearances in Minneapolis."

Tashlin's name first appears on the June 8 draft. There's still an overly complicated snarl of characters, but Junior's sexual and filial neuroses and the peculiar loyalty of old Hank (later to be old Ebeneezer) are settled, along with many cartoony sight gags and a twisted revision of the first movie's hit song, "Buttons & Bows."

By the end of June, Tashlin has completely restructured the film, complete with a real ending, albeit not the one finally used. (The ghost of Potter's father nuzzles Jane Russell. JUNIOR: "I don't understand this. Crosby always gets the girl!") Most tangles are gone except for some unnecessary complexity in Jane Russell's motivation. (In this version, Potter père and his partner had stolen a gold mine from Russell's father, shot him, tripped him, and pushed him over a cliff.) A stage direction explains the train of thought which led to one of the film's more elaborate non-sequitur gags: "JUNIOR is in a large barrel bathing in the coy manner of all the deMille bathtub heroines."

At the end of July, the Breen Office unleashed its righteous wrath. Most of the excised material must have been written with some knowledge of its likely fate:

LILY: Darling, you look so warm. Let me loosen your tie.
JUNIOR: All right. Just don't loosen my belt. I'm liable to break a toe.

LILY: (Caressing his face) Darling, how smooth your skin is!
JUNIOR: There's plenty more where that came from, baby!

JUNIOR turns from keyhole.
JUNIOR: Hold on, friends -- in my excitement I swallowed the doorknob.

... and, sadly, the payoff of Junior's "kaboodle talk":

... what with havin' to sashay mah mavericks an' sagebrushing mah dogies an' brandin' mah stray buckboards till I'm plumb ornery... an' I ain't had mah ornery plumbed since I left Harvard.

Unsurprisingly, the Office also insisted on censoring all hints of homosexuality or bestiality. But despite their confident assertions — "As you know, such a passage could not be approved in the finished picture," "Junior's dialogue is unacceptable for obvious reasons" — Tashlin ignored every one of these requests. A Junior Potter without sexual confusion would have no character at all. The single damaging cut accepted by Tashlin (leaving the prenuptial scene short on gags) was comparatively innocuous:

LILY: I think I'll go and freshen up, dear.
JUNIOR: (Anxiously) Hurry back before the Reverend Mr. Schwartz gets here... Just think, pretty soon we'll be three... counting Schwartz... and then, in a year or two, who knows... maybe Schwartz will have a son.

Did they fear a reverend with children might offend Catholics?

The Road to Son of Paleface, 5

Q: In your writing for both cartoons and features, did you draw any line between possible and impossible gags?
A: It depends on who does the gag.

- Frank Tashlin, interview with Mike Barrier, 1971

I think one of the reasons you invest yourself in characters is: who plays them? When he was doing a Bob Hope vehicle, he could have Bob Hope carry the movie, because everybody knew Bob Hope and the kind of stuff he did, and he'd be able to use that.... It's just that he's not afraid to take them a little further than people were used to being taken at that time.

- Joe Dante, interview with Bill Krohn, Frank Tashlin, ed. Roger Garcia, 1994

To the promised land of feature film Tashlin carried assets of self-awareness, anxiety, and vulgarity: an ability not just to tap the repressed, but to hand it the reins. Hope's stardom mixed two inherently unstable comic staples: the wise-cracking fool and the feckless letch. By exaggerating both to previously (and thereafter) unimagined levels, Tashlin achieved the comedian's apotheosis. And, as Mel Gibson taught us, apotheosis is a painful process.

Macaroni supreme, Junior Potter presents something more bizarre than puffed-up cowardice. Outrageous camping combines with eye-bulging homophobia; expressions of randiness are compulsive, somewhere between a tic and a fit, but seem unattached to any thought of consummation. From observation of his Harvard classmates, he knows lust calls for leering and predatorial behavior and he knows it involves some division between men and women, but I'm not sure he knows precisely what that is. Literally dozens of gags concern sexual panic.

His confusion overflows into the script at large. Jane Russell's character (renamed from "Lily" to "Mike") promises, "As soon as I get him under a full moon, I'll empty his father's chest," and it's positioned as a laugh line — but meaning what exactly? Another irrationally-numbered entendre closes the film.

As Junior proudly declares, "I'm a novelty." Where does such a creature come from?

A line of arrested-development "Juniors" stretches across Tashlin's career from the legged-egg of "Booby Hatched" to the frustrated boss of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? The original Paleface ended with its hero losing his bride-to-be before their wedding night, and although it's probably sanest not to consider that film as sharing its sequel's universe, Junior Potter comes close to androgenesis. The ghost of his legendary father — the lyin'est crookedest mangiest rottenest low-down critter that never drew a sober breath — literally haunts the movie. Whereas all we know of his mother is that Senior disinherited her and that she assigned Junior a gender at age twelve, two years after he kissed a girl (and darn if he ain't ready again).

... begotten by Despair / Upon Impossibility.

But the queerest, feyest thing about Junior is the extent to which his queerness escapes notice. Despite the extremest efforts of Edith Head's costume department and Technicolor's saturated reds, every character in the film accepts Potter at face value as just a dude with an inheritance.

What Bob Hope had to add to Donald Duck's sputter and Daffy Duck's self-awareness was fear. Not fear of death so much as the self-devouring fear of humiliation, of being found out. And left unremarked that fear swells to universal proportions: isn't everything as empty and arbitrary as he suspects himself to be? Junior isn't just an intrusion of fantasy; he's the sole recognizer of fantasy. When the film's title is announced, and when de Mille puts in his cameo, Hope conveys a metaphysical perplexity as anguished as Kleist's. He alone grasps the implications of the singing cowboy's hippophilia and he alone considers "Mike" "a pretty masculine handle for such a feminine pot of goodies." When he cautions a character not to repeat a shtick from an earlier scene, his admonishment is blankly accepted, no curiosity, no questions asked. He's the guy who knows the score, but no one's interested in the game.

Long before Junior's horseless carriage set forth, galli, berdaches, hijira, and sangomas blazed a path from ambiguous alienation and ambiguous knowledge to ambiguous power. Michael Ripinsky-Naxon describes three phases of shamanic initiation:

1. Androgyny and adornment 1
2. Administration of hallucinogenic preparations, with "an echo of a strong sexual tenor permeating all aspects of the trance" 2
3. A journey on which one meets a "power animal" who "may even become the shaman's spiritual spouse" 3

While the parallels to Son of Paleface are striking, Tashlin's conclusion more directly addresses a fellow satirist, Andrew Marvell:

When a gift for fantasy becomes dependent on a hypocritical system of fantasy, betrayal and complicity entwine. To the lasting offense of right-thinking critics everywhere, Tashlin, unlike most movie-makers, grappled openly with that dilemma. We're all in the same boat, but conscience demanded he at least admit there's a boat here and water underneath. In Hope's other solo vehicles, his character was walked through some pretense of "redemption" before receiving benediction from the plotline; Tashlin instead rewards Junior's decision to, all right, then, go to Hell.

In a world where nothing rings true, anything is permitted. Boy gets girl in extremis, when she fully recognizes his supernatural (or supergeneric) abilities. And the very next — the next-to-last — gag, prurient and nonsensical at the same time, is an extravagant reminder of the characters' encasement by Hollywood film.

All Junior knows is what the movies show him, and he knows that can't be right. But one has to live.