Maybe the idea could, on paper, have appeared something worth shooting.
But ham-handed directing and acting ruin whatever potential it might have had, which is probably not that much. It would have required very skillful if not talented inputs to win the day. Norma Crane has an interestingly touching face - possibly due in part to the weird hairdo - and she does her best, but she is completely out of her wits to make any of the dual parts of her character in the least believable. Mike Mazurki is given a thoroughly incomprehensible small role, which heavy sinister looks are supposed to make clearer but do not.
As to Paladin he is taking the role of a paradoxical Pygmalion, who very quickly understands the real personality between the mask of the aspiring Calamity Jane and who does the right things to reunite her with her lover of forever. But much less helpfully, he far from refrains of doing everything in his extensive range of possibilities, including Yeats' poems, to dazzle and seduce her, which is a little too successful for her and his own good.
Could it be that he is slightly vain, always striving to be admired by the fairer sex even when his Reason should tell him better?