"I do Bob Hope all the time. The reason people don't
see it is that I'm not as good." When Woody Allen
commented on his idol he could easily have been
speaking of millions of people who turned to Hope for
some laughs and a little entertainment. He seemed to
be everywhere in a career that stretched nearly a
century and encompassed stage, radio, records,
movies, television, USO shows, comic books anything
was fair game. But no matter where or what, he was
still recognizably Bob Hope. Contrasted to somebody
with an equally varied career like Orson Welles who took
each medium as a new challenge, Hope's basic persona
stayed mostly the same. If you saw a wisecracking,
somewhat cowardly layabout but who got the job done,
then that's Hope (and clearly much of Allen's early work
as well).
This is plainly visible in the sampling of his films on the
DVD set
Bob Hope: MGM Movie Legends
Collection. Ranging over three decades, the films
show Hope in full Hope mode whether he's rushing
merrily through some trifling story or trying to heat up a
script that somebody should have rethought. His film
career started with several shorts in the mid-30s before
moving to a few supporting spots and finally graduating
to lead roles in 1938's
Give Me a Sailor. (He
gained a theme song in that February's
The Big
Broadcast of 1938 and then used it for a film title
before the year was out: "Thanks for the Memory".) In
1940 he was teamed with Bing Crosby in
Road to
Singapore and Hope's place on the silver screen
was assured. He consistently found time for a string of
starring roles until 1972 and then settled into cameo
appearances after that.
The earliest film here, 1943's
They Got Me
Covered, is also one of the best. Hope plays a
hapless reporter in wartime Washington DC who
blunders into a spy ring, dragging girlfriend Dorothy
Lamour along with him. The film looks like it was shot
quickly and has a charming disregard for reality: the
Nazi spy base is an improbably large fashion salon and
their safe house has--for no apparent reason--Donald
Meek who believes he's protecting President Lincoln
from the Confederates. But reality hardly matters.
Hope is in fine form tossing off sharp gags and standing
up to the spies when his first impulse is to flee in panic.
Lamour matches him move for move and provides a solid
foil for Hope's antics, not just a straight person to play
against but a full and smarter partner.
Two more efforts toss Hope into genre films.
The
Princess and the Pirate (1944) imagines him as one
of the world's worst touring actors accidentally captured
by pirates and eventually rescuing disguised princess
Virginia Mayo. In
Alias Jesse James (1959),
Hope is a New York insurance agent who unknowingly
takes out a life policy on Jesse James and then has to
head out West to be sure nothing happens to his client.
Among the sagebrush, he gets tangled up with saloon
girl Rhonda Fleming. You see the pattern of pairing him
against beautiful leading ladies though neither Mayo nor
Fleming are up to Lamour's standard, which could be
due to the scripts. Both films are lively though
Princess is clearly the funnier and more inventive
of the two. Western fans will definitely want to see an
inspired sequence at the end of
Alias Jesse
James that can't be revealed here without ruining the
gag.
Moving into the 60s, studios seemed to have less idea
of what to do with Hope. His comic approach never
completely went out of style, just changed forms. Still,
it was easy to see Hope as outdated when surrounded
by the dissolving studio system, TV's challenges and
the new breed of comics (Lenny Bruce, Nichols & May,
Bob Newhart). Hope no longer fit into a clear position,
something the later films in the set show.
Boy, Did I
Get a Wrong Number! (1966) imagines Hope as a
bland, devoted family man who gets tangled up with
Elke Sommer as a European sex kitten running away
from the set of her latest film. Probably envisioned as a
classic farce, this is really the type of film whose story
would fall completely apart if Hope only revealed to his
wife that Sommer was hiding in their cabin. Like many
films of the period, it plays at being "naughty" or "free
spirited" but is utterly conventional (even Hope's gags
are more restrained). At least Phyllis Diller is on hand
as an assertive housemaid to spark up the proceedings.
The same faux naughtiness can be seen in 1965's
I'll
Take Sweden where single father Hope packs
teenaged daughter Tuesday Weld off to Sweden to keep
her out of the hands of her layabout, quasi-beatnik
boyfriend. It's an example of how far out of touch the
film is that the layabout boyfriend is Frankie Avalon.
There are a few halfhearted moves toward unmarried
hankypanky and several jokes at the openness of
Swedish romantic life as
Sweden drifts among
the same realm of supposedly free-spirted farce as
Wrong Number. In the end nothing out of the
ordinary happens unless you count Avalon's
stop-the-story and never-campy-enough songs. The film
does close with a classic door-slamming, in-and-out of
room sequence but overall is pretty dreary despite the
best efforts of Hope and Weld (but almost nobody
else).
One highlight of these later years is the seventh and
final "Road" film,
Road to Hong Kong from 1962.
Dorothy Lamour, co-star of the previous films, was
replaced by Joan Collins, probably because Collins was
two decades younger but also due to a British
production company wanting to showcase their own
talent. As it turns out, Collins didn't showcase
impressively and Lamour's brief cameo appearance
proves she was smarter, funnier and simply more
attractive. Nevertheless, while
Hong Kong is the
weakest in the series (the spies and space travel plot
was barely enough for a TV skit and has dated badly) it
shows why Hope and Crosby were such a good team
and doesn't completely deserve its reputation as a
stumbling end to the series. The duo's gags come
across as actual dialogue rather than bits of something
the writers concocted and both create a feeling of
relaxed humor that many more aggressive comics would
do well to emulate (if they can). Peter Sellers appears
as an Indian doctor in a small segment that's a
mini-masterpiece of double-talk. The film does have a
couple of misguided sequences (one involving a feeding
maching in the space capsule is particularly humiliating)
and some comments about Asia are a bit dubious today
but overall Hope and Crosby still displayed enough
charm that you almost wish they could have done one
more film.
The anomaly here is 1960's
The Facts of Life,
Hope's attempt at a more-or-less straight dramatic role.
There are still jokes-Hope wasn't about to leap into a
void-but this time they come from his character and
even bring out criticism from others. Most notably that's
Lucille Ball as a friend's wife who can't stand the
humorous commentary and good-fellow cheerfulness in
a critique, however mild, of Hope's usual persona.
During a group vacation to Mexico where most of the
group gets waylaid, Hope and Ball follow the Hollywood
rule that opposites attract and start an affair. Played
mostly straight,
The Facts of Life is fairly reliable
melodrama with a smear of comedy (one sequence
where Hope gets lost among identical motels is clever)
but never quite pulls together. The big problem is that
Hope either didn't have this type of acting in him or
needed more firm guidance from the director. Ball on
the other hand is completely plausible as a lonely wife,
almost single-handedly keeping the film from feeling
by-the-book. Viewed today it's odd to think this
gathered five Oscar® nominations, winning one for
best black-and-white costume design.
Bob Hope: MGM Movie Legends Collection
has each film on a separate disc in a slim clase. There
are no extras beyond trailers though a couple of the later
films have a choice of full-screen or letterboxed (but
none are fully widescreen). The transfers are solid
though there are a few moments in
The Princess and
the Pirate where it appears as if the Technicolor
strips were briefly out of registration. Nothing major and
a lot of viewers won't even notice. The set
On The
Road With Bob Hope And Bing Crosby which
collects the first four "Road" films is still the best place
to see Hope in action but this is a good if uneven
follow-up.
For more information about
Bob Hope: MGM Movie
Legends Collection, visit
MGM. To order
Bob Hope: The MGM Movie Legends
Collection, go to
TCM Shopping.
by Lang Thompson
