Funny movie quotes from The Paleface – a very funny movie set in the old American West, where a dentist from the East (played wonderfully by Bob Hope) goes out west, where he meets outlaw-turned-lawman Jane Russell, who uses him as her cover while she looks for gun runners. Bob Hope is at his best at the cowardly lady chaser, who has wonderful screen chemistry with the beautiful Jane Russell.
Funny movie quotes from The Paleface starring Bob Hope and Jane Russell
‘Painless’ Peter Potter (Bob Hope): Brave men run in my family.
‘Painless’Peter Potter (Bob Hope): That’s Indian country out there!
Calamity Jane (Jane Russell): You’re not afraid of a few Indians, are you?
‘Painless’Peter Potter (Bob Hope): It’s not the Indians I’m afraid of. It’s their attitudes.
‘Painless’Peter Potter (Bob Hope): I’ve been chased by women before, but never when I was awake!
‘Painless’Peter Potter (Bob Hope): Going west in a covered wagon. That’s my kind of life. Blazing new frontiers, facing danger, privation, and death. Is that my kind of life?
‘Painless’Peter Potter (Bob Hope): Indian country. Do we have to go that way?
Calamity Jane (Jane Russell): Now Painless, I’ll be with you. You’re not afraid, are you?
‘Painless’Peter Potter (Bob Hope): No. I can always get another scalp.
‘Painless’Peter Potter (Bob Hope): There’s a million Indians out here against one coward!
‘Painless’Peter Potter (Bob Hope): [draws his guns] I hope they’re loaded. I wish I was, too.
‘Painless’Peter Potter (Bob Hope): Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, I’d like to say a few words.
Pioneer: Oh, let’s get out of here before them redskins come back.
‘Painless’Peter Potter (Bob Hope): Those are the words!
Editorial review of The Paleface | Bob Hope, Jane Russell, courtesy of Amazon.com
Bob Hope brings his own brand of laughing gas to the Wild West as a would-be ‘painless’ dentist lassoed into marrying Jane Russell. She’s a shapely outlaw turned undercover agent on the trail of some varmints selling guns to a hostile Indian tribe, and he’s her unwitting cover. Hope cowers and cracks self-effacing jokes while bodies fall around him (“Brave men run in my family,’ he quips, then runs), but he’s even funnier swaggering and sneering like a kid playing cowboy in a flamboyant costume apparently stolen from the Oklahoma! road show.
The Paleface is one of his best films, and the unflappable Russell is a great match. Theme song ‘Buttons and Bows‘ (which Hope delivers with a clowning mock twang) won an Oscar®, and the 1948 film spawned a sequel (Son of Paleface, costarring Roy Rogers and Trigger) and a remake (The Shakiest Gun in the West with Don Knotts). —Sean Axmaker
[Updated August 19, 2022]