I walked to Charles’ place with the video of Bob Hope’s 1947 comedy My Favorite Brunette. This one has always been a favorite of mine because it’s essentially a spoof of film noir — maybe not that great a spoof of film noir, but a nicely made little movie with some interesting scenes that revealed Hope’s talents as an actor (particularly moments of pantomime in which, faced with some God-awful danger, his surface pose of bravado fades away and his “real” cowardly nature comes through) and a nice supporting cast: Dorothy Lamour as the “mystery woman” who lures him into the plot, Frank Puglia in a dual role as her wheelchair-bound uncle and a non-disabled baddie who impersonates him as part of the sinister scheme, Peter Lorre (both his presence and the San Francisco setting are evocative of The Maltese Falcon), Lon Chaney, Jr. (as a mentally retarded member of the gang — at one point Bob Hope, in an effort to get Chaney on his side, says, “I’ll even buy you a rabbit!”) and cameos by Alan Ladd (as the hard-boiled detective Hope impersonates through most of the film) and Bing Crosby (as the executioner at San Quentin, visibly disappointed when the last-minute reprieve comes through and he doesn’t get to execute Hope after all) — thereby reuniting, at least briefly, the stellar trio from the Road movies. — 11/3/97
•••••
At least partly as an antidote to the dreadful political
news I was expecting from the midterm election (expectations the outcome, alas,
delivered on big-time), I decided to settle in last night and watch two movies
from the marathon TCM was doing on Bob Hope, My Favorite Blonde and My Favorite Brunette. I’d seen both before but I thought it would be fun
to take advantage of this opportunity to watch them back-to-back. I’ve actually
seen My Favorite Brunette — made
five years later (1947 instead of 1942) — more often than I had My
Favorite Blonde, mainly because while My
Favorite Blonde was a Paramount Pictures
production that remained in copyright, My Favorite Brunette was a Hope Enterprises production — some prints have
an opening logo identifying the producing studio as “CMP” (for “California
Motion Pictures”) — that slipped into the public domain and got reissued to
death on commercial television, VHS and ultimately DVD. (I remember buying a
VHS tape that promised My Favorite Blonde on the cover but actually delivered My Favorite Brunette, and for some reason the print of My
Favorite Brunette TCM showed last night
contained a closing logo from Columbia Pictures during the brief time they were
owned by Coca-Cola before they were acquired by Sony.) My Favorite
Blonde was made in 1942 and was clearly
meant to parody the films of Alfred Hitchcock in general and The 39
Steps in particular — down to casting the
same leading lady, Madeleine Carroll.
Like a lot of Hope’s genre spoofs, My Favorite Blonde opens absolutely “straight” for the first reel or so
as we learn that the MacGuffin is “The Scorpion,” an elaborate pin made to look
like a scorpion, that contains, encoded in Egyptian hieroglyphics, a top-secret
route some British bombers are going to take. The information needs to get to
the squadron (which is supposedly based in Los Angeles, of all places, though
what British bombing planes were doing clear at the other end of the U.S. from
the Atlantic is a mystery writers Melvin Frank, Norman Panama, Don Hartman,
Frank Butler and an uncredited Barney Dean never explained) before they take
off because their previously planned route has been discovered by the enemy,
and the film’s principal villains, Dr. Hugo Streger (George Zucco) and Madame
Stephanie Runick (Gale Sondergaard), will stop at nothing, including murder, to
steal the scorpion pin and prevent the Brits from re-routing the planes away
from the German fighters ready to shoot them down. The scorpion is being
carried by British agent Karen Bentley (Madeleine Carroll), who’s about to be
captured by the baddies and, frantically seeking a place to hide the scorpion,
pins it inside the lapel jacket of Larry Haines (Bob Hope). Haines is a small-time
vaudevillian who does an act with a trained penguin named Percy, and he — or,
rather, Percy — has just received a Hollywood film offer (when Daily
Variety publishes a story that the studio
has signed Percy but nixed Haines for an on-screen role in Percy’s film, Haines
snarls in Bob Hope’s best comic snarl, “I’ll remember that when they ask me for
an ad”) and is about to take the train going west. Karen accosts him and,
depending on whether he has the scorpion on him or she’s recovered it, either
makes love to him or slaps him across the face.
As in a real Hitchcock movie,
the leads end up suspected of murder and have to travel across the U.S.,
fleeing the cops and finding the enemy spies themselves. My Favorite
Blonde has some good scenes, including a knockoff
of the famous one in The 39 Steps
in which the male lead has to impersonate an authority figure (a politician in The
39 Steps, a pediatrician here) and deliver
an extemporaneous speech to a perplexed audience to avoid getting caught by the
bad guys, and a quite funny one in which Hope crashes a Teamsters Union picnic
by impersonating a driver named Mulrooney (according to this version of the
Teamsters Union, all its members
are Irish-American and speak with thick brogues) and the real Mulrooney is unable
to convince the ticket-taker of his identity, with the result that they start
two colossal brawls. The finale has Larry and Karen stealing an airplane,
crash-landing in a watermelon patch after they run out of gas, and being
captured by the local sheriff’s deputy as they help themselves to a couple of
the watermelons — only they get away, steal a truck and high-tail it to L.A.,
where the villains’ headquarters is in a funeral home and there’s a quite good
gag in which Hope is concealed in one of the coffins — but his legs are
sticking out of the bottom so he’s able to move. Ultimately it’s Percy, Hope’s
attack penguin, who saves the day by biting the arm of the villains’ gunman
just as he’s about to blast him and Carroll to kingdom come, the cops (summoned
by Hope’s agent!) arrest the bad guys and the planes take off, presumably to
make their bombing run without incident.
My Favorite Blonde is an O.K. movie; Bob Hope and Madeleine Carroll
have zero chemistry together as a couple, though that bothered me less than it
did between Hope and Katharine Hepburn in The Iron Petticoat because the two leads’ utter incompatibility is
actually part of the film’s gag world. Most of the writers were from Hope’s
radio show and they came up with some good one-liners for him, including the
gibberish they gave him when he and Carroll’s character decide to evade the
villains’ latest trap by pretending to be a husband and wife who are in a nasty
argument that has got physical (Larry Haines:
“So, I’m a muckfritchetous snitdrivel, am I?” Karen Bentley:
“Yes, and you’re also a scridgepodge, that’s what you are!”) so the police will
arrest them both for beating each other, but overall it’s fun but hardly as
much fun as a mock thriller could have been with a better director than ex-Fox
hack Sidney Lanfield and a script by a master constructionist with a flair for genre clashes instead of a committee of radio gag men. (If
only Paramount had put Preston Sturges on it as both writer and director …
Sturges and Hope together. Sigh.) Ironically, when I looked up My
Favorite Blonde on imdb.com I got a review
from 2005 from someone calling him- or herself “oldmovieguy” who liked it
considerably better than I did. “Hope is excellent here, much better than in
the Road pictures. He’s less
self-conscious here — no talking to the camera, no in-jokes between him and
Crosby, no leering at Lamour.” That’s funny (and not in the comic sense,
either): while watching My Favorite Blonde precisely what I found myself missing were the in-jokes, the
frame-breaking and the leering he and Bing Crosby both did at Dorothy Lamour in
the still screamingly funny Road
movies!
Maybe one reason My Favorite Brunette is better known than My Favorite Blonde is that it slipped into the public domain (and TCM’s
print wasn’t as good as usual for them — the first half of the film is rather
“soft” pictorially and the second half, apparently from a different source, is
sharper in the images but more piercing and treble-heavy in the soundtrack),
but I suspect it also has to do with Brunette being a way better movie than Blonde. This time Hope’s vis-à-vis is Dorothy Lamour — no doubt about their chemistry together! — and instead of being a spoof
of Hitchcock (which suffers by comparison with later Hitchcock spoofs like Mel
Brooks’ High Anxiety because in
1942 Hitchcock hadn’t yet made most of the films lampooned in High
Anxiety) My Favorite Brunette is a spoof of film noir in general and The Maltese Falcon in particular. Hope plays San Francisco-based baby
photographer Ronny Jackson, whose office and studio are located in a sordid
building next to the digs of private detective Sam McCloud (Alan Ladd in a
marvelous cameo which I think was used as one of the many clips from 1940’s
films spliced into the Steve Martin vehicle Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid). Ronny has developed an ambition to become a
private eye himself — a job for which he’s so outrageously unsuited that the
film actually opens in San Quentin with Ronny about to be executed for a murder
he didn’t commit, and being allowed to narrate his story to reporters so we get
Hope telling the tale in a wicked parody of the first-person narration of Murder,
My Sweet and many other classic noirs.
When McCloud has to take a trip out of town for 10
days, he asks Ronny to look after his office and answer his phone — and of
course Ronny ends up posing as McCloud after damsel-in-distress Carlotta Montay
(Dorothy Lamour) comes to the office telling a breathless tale and pleading for
his help in similar tones to those with which Mary Astor approached Humphrey
Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. It
helps that My Favorite Brunette
has only two screenwriters (Edmund Beloin and Jack Rose) and is a far better
constructed movie, with a plot that actually makes sense within the conventions
of both comedy and thriller, and the director, Elliott Nugent, is far better
than Lanfield; aided by cinematographer Lionel Lindon, he gets some genuine noir compositions into this film, including one
marvelously vertiginous shot of a San Francisco street seen from the point of
view of Hope’s office. Carlotta tells Ronny that she came to the U.S. from
South America with her wheelchair-bound husband Baron Montay (Frank Puglia) —
whom she later admits is actually her uncle, not her husband (she ID’d them as
a couple at first in hopes of forestalling the leering, luring and pass-making
Ronny inevitably subjects her to anyway), and this time the MacGuffin is a map
of a mineral deposit in South America of utmost importance both to the U.S. and
its (carefully unnamed, though virtually everyone in the 1947 audience knew who
they were supposed to be) enemies. In a marvelous scene sending up the absurdity
and irrelevance of the MacGuffin, Carlotta explains that it’s important because
the land contains cryolite. “Oh, we mustn’t let them get hold of the cryolite!”
Ronny exclaims. “What’s cryolite?” “It contains kryptobar.” “Oh, we can’t let
them get hold of the kryptobar! What’s kryptobar?” Then, and only then, does
she finally explain that
kryptobar is an ore with a high concentration of uranium, and both Ronny and
the audience finally relax at being given an explanation of the plot involving
something we’ve actually heard of.
The film is a series of chases (again)
between Our Hero and Heroine on one side and a marvelously assorted group of
villains led by Kismet (Peter Lorre, in fine form) who are anxious to obtain
the map so they can sell the uranium-bearing kryptobar inside the cryolite to
the highest bidder on the international market. At one point they convince
Ronny that Carlotta is crazy — until Ronny climbs a window of the huge mansion
in which the baddies are hiding out and see Baron Montay getting out of his
wheelchair and walking around, which lets Ronny know that Carlotta is telling
the truth and the “Montay” in the villains’ custody is actually an impostor.
Later on the baddies lure Ronny to the Seacliff Manor, which is actually an
insane asylum where Willie (Lon Chaney, Jr. doing his “Lennie” voice from Of
Mice and Men — it’s so close that when
Ronny is being held captive in the asylum he tries to trick Willie into helping
him escape by saying, “I’ll buy you a rabbit”) is one of the keepers and Ronny
plays a round of golf with a harmless nut who’s hitting a nonexistent ball.
(According to imdb.com, Hope wrote the golf scene himself.) There’s a somewhat
lame climax in which Ronny tries to trick the baddies into recording a
confession on a Dictaphone, but Kismet steals the record and substitutes one of
Betty Hutton singing “Murder, He Said” — though even in this odd scene there’s
yet another in-joke: as the villains are chasing him and Ronny is looking for a
place to hide the record, he reaches for the chandelier, finds a liquor bottle
in it and says, “Ray Milland’s been here!” Eventually we cut back to San
Quentin, where Ronny’s walk of the last mile is interrupted by a Chinese woman
whose baby he photographed early on — but by mistake he gave her the negative
of the picture he took of the phony Montay with the other villains, and this
exonerates him and puts him back in the good graces of Montay, Carlotta and the
U.S. government. Though there are even better films in the Hope canon (I still
have a great affection for The Great Lover), My Favorite Brunette
works both as a Hope vehicle and a film noir spoof and is an absolutely delightful movie. —
11/5/14
