Bob Hope, Movie Star
While more recent generations are familiar with Bob Hope through his television specials, many are barely aware that he also starred in 53 movie comedies over a 34-year period, some of them considered classics.
Woody Allen, one of Hope's most devoted admirers, admits that his fellow comedian was "not so funny" in television as he was in movies.
"But if you look at `Monsieur Beaucaire,' for instance, he's very, very funny," Allen declared in the 1993 book "Woody Allen on Woody Allen." "There are a number of films where he's allowed to show his brilliant gift of delivery, his brilliant gift of comic speech. He had a very breezy attitude, he was a great man with a quip. Those one-liners and witticisms they're just like air, he does them so lightly."
Hope started in films with eight comedy shorts he made in New York during his 1930s career in Broadway musicals. Because of his radio show's success, Paramount brought him to Hollywood for "The Big Broadcast of 1938," in which he and Shirley Ross sang "Thanks for the Memory."
He then starred in a series of box-office hits, notably "The Cat and the Canary," the "Road" pictures with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, "Caught in the Draft," "My Favorite Blonde," "The Paleface," "The Lemon Drop Kid," "The Seven Little Foys," "The Facts of Life."
Volumes have been written about the comedians of silent films: Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon. Verbal comedians like Hope have been overlooked or downplayed in critical assessments. That may be due for an overhaul.
"He would certainly be in the top five film comedians," Hal Kanter, comedy writer who co-wrote a half-dozen of Hope's movies, once said. "Hope was verbal, but he also could be very funny visually, too; you didn't have to just hear him. He could get tremendous laughs just reacting to things, without saying a word.
"I remember `Off Limits,' when Mickey Rooney was being examined for Army duty. A doctor was shining a light into Rooney's ear. Bob passed by, did a double-take, held his hand up, and the light went completely through Rooney's head. There was a joke that nobody ever heard because of roars at his reaction: 'This man is officer material.'"
Said Richard Schickel, film historian and critic for Time magazine: "I think in his time, particularly in the 1940s, he was a kind of major figure. First of all, it was the astonishing rapidity with which he sprayed jokes at you. Then he created an amusing character, basically a cowardly wolf. I don't think there was a lot of soul there; it was all rapid-fire patter. As a kid growing up, I thought he was terribly funny, and most of America did."
Schickel chuckled as he remembered scenes from "Caught in the Draft," in which Hope played a movie star who is drafted: "He was jumping off a piano so he could flatten his feet. They would shoot guns off near him and he'd faint. It works out: He accidentally does something heroic and he gets the girl.
"Certainly his partnership with Crosby was very amusing. Crosby was so cool, and Hope was so frantic. `The Road to Morocco' was a very funny movie. One of the things that Hope did that I thought was innovative was directly addressing the audience. Like in `The Road to Morocco,' when Hope tells all the trouble that Crosby got them into. `Yes, I know that,' says Crosby. Hope says, `Yeah, but the people who came in the middle of the picture don't."'
"I think Hope is the most verbal of all the film comedians," remarked Charles Champlin, longtime arts editor and film critic for the Los Angeles Times. "He not only had the lines, but he delivered them with a wonderful facade. As much as anybody else, Hope created and sustained a persona that lasted from his Broadway days until now, as when he reportedly cracked about his nurse during his hospital stay, `I've got golf balls that are older than she is ... '"
"He managed to avoid letting his success put a crush over his vulnerability, which was a nice part of his (on-camera) character. He could be terrified, he could be funny as a kind of loser. He lost only a little of that as he became more and more successful."