The Beautiful Blonde of Bashful Bend

Has…has Sturges just lost the touch he once had? I wouldn’t go nearly as far to call The Beautiful Blonde of Bashful Bend, his second (and last) film at Twentieth Century Fox, as bad, but there’s a certain deadness to much of what happens, this lack of dramatic throughline that helps provide the underpinnings of his best work. It seems as though this film was almost forced upon Sturges by Fox, looking to get him to make a comedy star out of Betty Grable, but its lack of success ended Sturges...