August 17 | 14 Movies
Where there’s TCM, there’s Hope for preserving the legacy of comedy icons.
On August 17, TCM devotes its Summer Under the Stars programming day to Bob Hope, whom his biographer Richard Zoglin aptly dubbed, “Entertainer of the Century.” Hope was the original king of all media. He was boffo in vaudeville and on Broadway, the movies (he was the top box office draw in 1949 and in the top 10 for 13 consecutive years), radio and television. His name fronted several best-selling (albeit ghost-written) memoirs. He even had his own comic book.
Hope hosted the Academy Awards an unprecedented 19 times. That he himself was never nominated for Hollywood’s supreme prize afforded his writers ripe fodder for jokes (“Welcome to the Academy Awards, or as it’s known at my house, Passover”). He performed for 12 presidents (“and entertained six,” he joked), and tirelessly entertained America’s troops overseas from World War II to the Persian Gulf conflict, which may serve as his most lasting legacy.
Hope made his feature film debut opposite W.C. Fields in The Big Broadcast of 1938 (1938). One in a series of Paramount vaudevillian music-revues, the film does not take full advantage of Hope beyond his way with a quip and leading man likeability. But it does contain, for Hope, an atypical bittersweet scene that marked him for stardom and gave him his signature theme song. His character, radio host Buzz Fielding, encounters his ex-wife (Shirley Ross) on an ocean liner. At a bar, over a drink, they reflect on their failed marriage with the song, “Thanks for the Memory.” The tune, written by Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
The Ghost Breakers (1940), one of the essential Hope vehicles in the TCM lineup, built on the success of the haunted house thriller comedy The Cat and the Canary (1939), his biggest box office hit to date and the one that established his onscreen persona as a wisecracking coward who, however reluctantly, must rise to the occasion to save a woman. In Ghost Breakers, it’s Paulette Goddard, who has inherited a reputed haunted castle in Cuba and is on the receiving end of increasingly threatening warnings to stay away.
Hope stars as a radio gossip columnist who stowaways in her steamer trunk aboard an ocean liner after mistakenly thinking he’s killed a gangster. But he’s on board to help Paulette even with all this talk of ghosts and zombies. “A zombie has no will of his own,” Hope is told. “You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.” “You mean like Democrats?” he responds.
Sometimes, Hope’s wisecracks admit his cowardice (“If a couple of fellows come running down the stairs in a few minutes, let the first one go. That’ll be me”) and other times they give him a hero’s mask. When a sinister character tells him he is brave for going to the castle, Hope corrects him, “Me? No, my nerves are the break-away kind. Why, do you know what’s liable to happen if I see a ghost there tonight? I’d be so scared I’d probably take a shot at it. Won’t I feel silly shooting ghosts? But that’s me all over. Tell your friends.”
Hope’s earliest, funniest comedies placed him where he didn’t belong. In My Favorite Blonde (1942), another of his best solo outings, he’s the classic unwitting Hitchcockian hero drawn into danger and espionage. The one doing the drawing is Madeleine Carroll, a British actress best known for her role in Hitch’s The 39 Steps from 1935 (Hope’s professing a crush on her was a recurring joke on his radio show until she contacted him to suggest they do a film together).
In Blonde, she’s a secret agent who involves him in a plot to keep a medallion containing military secrets from the Nazis, and Hope, a vaudevillian playing second fiddle to a penguin, will follow this glamorous vision anywhere. “Look at me,” she urges. “I’m looking,” Hope dreamily replies. “You’ve got to trust me,” she implores. “I’m not through looking,” he responds.
But though he professes being happier as a mouse than a man, he cannot submit to his every instinct to flee. “It’s got nothing to do with bombers or spies,” he admits to himself. “It’s those great big baby-blue eyes, that’s what’s pulling me back. Oh, what’s the use?”
Fetching company though Madeleine Carroll is, inarguably Hope’s greatest costars were Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour in seven Road comedies. TCM has carved out seven-and-a-half hours for some classic Road trips. Pack accordingly.
Pardon me a quick detour: Growing up in Chicago in the 1960s B.C. (Before Cable), the Road comedies (there were seven in all) were my introduction to Hope. A Road film or two would invariably be broadcast on New Year’s Eve, and they had everything a budding comedy buff could want: the easy banter between the two off-screen friends, the toss-the-script ad-libs and in-jokes that probably went over my head, but they just sounded funny, the recurring pat-a-cake routine, talking animals (“A fish, they let talk,” a bear complains in Road to Utopia (1945), “Me, they won’t give one stinking line.”) and the breaking of the fourth wall, as in Road to Bali (1952) when Hope and Crosby, enroute to an island paradise, notice a shirtless native man who tells them that all the natives dress that way. “You don’t suppose…” Hope inquires. “Not a chance,” Crosby replies. “Stick around, folks,” Hope tells the camera. “He could be wrong, you know.”
So indelible was Hope and Crosby’s chemistry that a cameo by Der Bingle was always good for a laugh in Hope’s solo comedies. In The Princess and the Pirate (1944), he makes a last-minute appearance and squires off Hope’s leading lady. “How do you like that?” Hope exclaims. “I knock my brains out for nine reels and a bit player from Paramount comes over and gets the girl. This is the last picture I do for Goldwyn.”
Look for him, too in My Favorite Blonde, My Favorite Brunette (1947) and Alias Jessie James (1959), when he, unbeknownst to Hope, comes to Hope’s aid during a climactic shoot-out. “This boy needs all the help he can get,” Bing says.
This TCM Hope-athon also contains some underseen gems, such as Nothing But the Truth (1941), in which stockbroker Hope accepts a bet that he cannot tell a lie for 24 hours, a great showcase for his verbal dexterity, and Critic’s Choice (1963), in which Hope plays an acerbic drama critic who wrestles with whether he should review wife Lucille Ball’s play.
Hope died 20 years ago at the age of 100. There are those who remember only the downside of his career; the unfortunate films such as Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! (1966), the out-of-touch 1960s NBC specials with their groan-worthy jokes about hippies and tin-ear take-offs on such thoroughly modern movies as The Graduate (1967), his close association with President Nixon and hawkish stance during the Vietnam War.
So, it’s not like Hope is trending, but for 24 hours, we can be reminded how he put his indelible stamp on screen comedy.
Thanks, Bob, for the memories.
