Caught in the Draft (Paramount, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The second film in TCM’s mini-tribute to Bob Hope yesterday afternoon was Caught in the Draft, a film inspired by the first peacetime draft in U.S. history, instituted by President Franklin Roosevelt and Congress in early 1941. Various studios grabbed hold of the peacetime draft as a theme for comedy, but potentially the greatest film on the topic was the one that didn’t get made. In 1941 Buster Keaton realized that the entire cast of his 1930 World War I spoof Doughboys were still alive and living in Los Angeles, so he pitched MGM on reuniting them for a sequel to Doughboys using all the cast members as they hard naturally aged. Alas,the “suits” at MGM told him that they didn’t think there’d be an audience for a comedy about the peacetime draft, so they turned him down. Then Universal made Buck Privates with their newly singed comedy stars,Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, and the resulting film became a huge hit and the highest grossing film of 1941. (That was quite an honor that this lowbrow comedy out-grossed Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, How Green Was My Valley and all the other enduring masterpieces of that year.) The success of Buck Privates encouraged other studios to green-light similar projects, including 209th Century-Fox’s Great Guns with Laurel and Hardy, and this Paramount film with Bob Hope.

Caught in the Draft has basically the same plot as Buck Privates and Great Guns; in all three, a stuck-up pampered rich brat (Lee Bowman in Buck Privates, Dick Nelson in Great Guns, and Hope here) ends up in the army, pleadas for special treatment, and finally learns his lesson and “mans up” in the service. Caught in the Draft has some interesting wrinkles to the basic formula added by screenwriters Harry Tugend and Wilkie Mahoney, including casting Hope as movie superstar Don Bolton, whom we’re told is equally capable in romantic dramas and action movies. He gets involved with the military when he falls in love with Antoinette “Toni’ Fairbanks (Dorothy Lamour), daughter of hard-nosed Col. Peter Fairbanks (Clarence Kolb), and hopes to marry her because at least at that time, married men were automatically exempted from the draft.

Later he learns that the cut-off date for draft registration is 31, not 40, so the 32-year-old Bolton tries to bail out of marrying Toni – only she sees through all his schemes. In a last-ditch attempt to gain her sympathy he agrees to enlist voluntarily – only he’s hired his personal assistant, Bert Sparks (Eddie Bracken), to pose as the recruiting sergeant (Edgar Dearing) when the real sergeant goes out to lunch. Don’s plan is that Bert will take his application and turn him down because of his incapacitating fear of loud noises – in the film’s opening scene he ruined a take of a waqr-mvoie sequence by fracking out at the sound of pistols – but Toni has seen through that one, too, and bribed the real sergeant not to take lunch that day. Not only does Don wind up in the army for real, so do Bart and Don’s manager, Steve Riggs (Lynne Overman, a marvelous dry-wit comic and close friend of James Cagney and Spencer Tracy, who went to Hollywood when they did and was forced to look on as they became superstars while he remained stuck in character roles).

In the film’s climax, Bart and Riggs switch the road signs on the practice field where the army is doing war games (both Buck Privates and Great Guns also ended with climactic war-games sequences as their writers’ way of including a big action climax even though the U.S. wasn’t yet in the war as a combatant when all these films were made). They realize at the last minute that their gimmick with the signs has led one of the practice armies into the artillery range, where another unit is practicing with real shells instead of blanks, and in order to save the troops from beinginadvertently massacred Don has to charge at the unit that’s about to be slaughtered to get them to turn back. In the end Don’s new-found heroism saves the day and he, Bart and Riggs all get promoted from privates to corporals – which Col. Fairbanks had laid down as hsi condition for allowing Don to marry the colonel’s daughter. Caught in the Draft was far more important for its long-term effect on Hope’s career than for anything about the film itself. Paramount’s publicity department decided to promote it by having Bob Hope perform at two actual military bases, including Fort Ord near Monterey, California where the outdoor location work had been done – and Hope loved the experience of performing at military bases so much he literally did it for the rest of his life!