The Great Lover (1949)

Too much of everything

How sad is this?

Good concept, poorly executed.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

I admit to loving Bob Hope in the '40s. He was cute, he had great delivery, and I loved that naive persona. In The Great Lover, he's a scout leader who falls for Rhonda Fleming on board ship, all the while he's being eyed by Roland Young as his next mark. Young plays a card shark who lets his mark win, then suggests one last cut of the cards for a winner take all. And of course he wins. When he doesn't, he still wins because he murders his victims and steals their money. The first victim we're shown is George "Superman" Reeves.Fleming and her father are impoverished royalty en route to sell a valuable necklace. Jim Backus, playing a detective after Young, is also on board.Some funny bits, with Fleming looking beautiful and Hope in great form. The best is when he has a $100 bill and a man asks to see it and then nearly pockets it - Jack Benny. Hope walks away from him, stops, and then says to himself, "No -- he'd never be in first class."

With the start of each Bob Hope movie, I begin my countdown as to when Bing Crosby might make a characteristic unscheduled appearance. So imagine my surprise when all of a sudden Jack Benny pops up in a typical skinflint role offering to change a hundred dollar bill for Hope's character. Hope's reaction to whether it was really the perennial thirty nine year old - "Naw, he wouldn't be traveling first class".You just had to be there during television's Golden Age to make much sense of that scene, which leads me to consider that modern day viewers miss a lot of the in jokes that comedians like Hope, Benny and Crosby were known and caricatured for back in the day. And you know something else? - they all did it without being off color or offensive, even if they managed to offer up a double entendre or three. That's why I keep going back to their films and TV specials, a neat time capsule reminder of life during a simpler time when we could all laugh at ourselves and each other without the politically correct deterrence of possibly offending someone. As for cameos, it probably wouldn't have passed for one at the time, because George Reeves hadn't achieved notoriety yet as the Man of Steel. However it was pretty cool to see him in an opening scene, even if it didn't end so well for his character. Now here's a line that had me doing some quick research. Duchess Alexandria (Rhonda Fleming) remarks to Freddie Hunter (Hope), that "Someday I hope to have seven little boys". It wasn't till some six years later that Hope would star in the biographical film "The Seven Little Foys" - a strange bit of cosmic serendipity. I wonder if Hope ever thought about that?The odd thing for me about the story had to do with Hope's alliance with the Boy Foresters in the picture; for all intents and purposes they were a knockoff of the Boy Scouts, with an oath that was somewhat similar. I wasn't counting, but Hope's character probably managed to break most of the rules regarding Forester behavior. The boys of course, try to keep him on the straight and narrow with mixed results. But then again, who wouldn't stray with Rhonda Fleming on board.With a title like "The Great Lover", one might expect a bit more in the romance department, but this one is played more for laughs and Hope's quick wit. It's not one of the legendary comedian's best or well known films, but Hope fans will enjoy it, and that after all, is why we tune in.

A middling Bob Hope movie that provides only occasional laffs, the poorly titled "The Great Lover" (1949) proved something of a disappointment for me, especially in light of the infinitely superior Hope picture "The Ghost Breakers" (1940) that I'd just seen a few days earlier. In "The Great Lover," Hope plays a scoutmaster from N. Zanesville, Ohio who is chaperoning his small troop of obnoxiously upright brats on a trans-Atlantic boat voyage whilst getting involved with destitute duchess Rhonda Fleming and becoming the pawn of cardsharp/psycho strangler Roland Young. Patently unrealistic antics ensue, some of them mildly entertaining, but not enough for consistent amusement. Still, the picture DOES have enough going for it to warrant a mild recommendation. Rhonda Fleming, 26 here and extremely beautiful, makes a nice foil for Hope, though it's a pity her gorgeous red hair can't be appreciated in this B&W film. She and Skislopenose perform a cute musical number, too. Also fun are some cameos and bit parts by that ol' skinflint Jack Benny (uncredited), as well as George "Superman" Reeves and Jim "Mr. Magoo" Backus. It's also interesting to see the usually mild-mannered Roland "Topper" Young playing against type as the crazy villain. Unfortunately, the "good folks" at Brentwood Communications have done it again, offering another lousy-looking/sounding DVD from a crappy 16mm print source, and with no extras to speak of. All in all, while fun enough, "The Great Lover" wasn't that, um, great.

To me "The Great Lover" was the last great Hope film: he had some good lines, the plot was OK and most importantly Golden Age high production values were much in evidence. The nitrate gleams and is an essential component in the enjoyment of it, Hope and Fleming and the "ship" itself would not have looked as romantic on safety stock film. And the rot that set in with the advent of safety film in the early 1950's had already begun in TGL - just listen to those 2 inept songs, they wouldn't have got as far as being filmed even 5 years previously. The nadir was reached a few years later in "My favourite spy", with a seemingly endless Hope song as excruciating as anything Norman Wisdom could have performed, and utterly ruined an average film for me.I always counted Roland Young as a villain because I saw this first as a kid, whereas he was a pretty versatile actor and played plenty of goodies in his time too. He's a ruthless card sharper in this however, Roland Culver is a cold steely and "broke" aristocrat who Young wants to fleece, Fleming is his high class daughter the innocent Hope falls for. He in turn is leader of 7 little Boy Forresters with Grumpy as 2nd in command.Favourite bits: The morning exercises; Hope petulantly parping smoke through one of the boys bugles; getting distracted by Fleming over champagne as only Hope ever could. The bad bits: a/m songs to avoid. I leave the rest to you to find out!