My Favorite Blonde (1942)

You won't be disappointed!

hyped garbage

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

78 minutes of comic waste best highlights this silly 1942 tale.Bob Hope again is caught up with Nazi spies as he is brought into this by British agent Madeleine Carroll.The jokes and punchlines are ridiculous at best. The scene with the boy who spits at him was absolutely ridiculous.Gale Sondergaard is along for the ride. She says little in this one, but is her usual sinister self. Just those facial expressions alone make you know that she is up to no good.The funeral parlor scene by film's end leaves you very much unsatisfied. Even the airfield ending makes you feel that you have missed something.

After swooning for quite some time on his radio show about Madeline Carroll, the actress, enjoying the publicity, approached him about being a guest on his show. Hope suggested that instead, they do a film together. The result is the delightful "My Favorite Blonde" about a British spy, Carroll, trying to deliver a coded message to Los Angeles. Attempting to escape German agents, she barges into a theater dressing room inhabited by Hope, who is performing as straight man to a penguin.Hope is a riot, with the wisecracks coming quickly throughout the film, and Carroll is a good leading lady for him - classy, serious, and the character she plays is game for anything to reach her goal. Gale Sondergaard has precious little to do - one wonders if her role was cut; Dooley Wilson has an unspoken bit on the train; and Bing Crosby directs Hope to a bus in one scene. Hope starts to walk away from him, stops, takes a beat and says to himself, "No. It couldn't be." There are other in jokes as well - Hope turns the radio to his own show and turns it off, commenting, "I can't stand that guy." As someone who was a young adult in the '60s, it wasn't kosher to like Bob Hope because of his politics, but I've always enjoyed his film performances. "My Favorite Blonde" is one of his best.

Carroll is a British secret agent on the run from German spies. She's carrying valuable information that must reach Los Angeles. She lands in New York and eludes her pursuers by dashing into Hope's dressing room while he's on stage doing a bad act with a penguin. The thin plot has Hope and Carroll traveling across country with the bad guys always on their tail. So far, just formula. But 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. Woody Allen once said that his film persona was to a large extent modeled after Bob Hope's character and nowhere is this more evident than here. As you watch the movie, try to imagine Woody playing Hope's role. You can easily visualize Woody doing the lines as Woody and it's not much different from Hope (though Hope's character isn't a New York neurotic). Definitely worth watching.

Writing as someone who can definitely take or leave -- more likely leave -- Bob Hope, I call this a charmer. He is restrained here. Madeleine Carroll is a chic partner. The penguin I could do without but maybe that was fun for kids.I like some of the "Road" pictures and they're OK. Bing Crosby is way down near the bottom of stars in terms of my own preference. And Hope's politics -- well, it is hard to ignore them. This one is very different, though. Hope really plays a character, though he at times reverts to playing Bob Hope.The movie looks good and is well plotted.What puzzles me is that Gale Sondergaard, third-billed, seems to have almost no lines. At least in the print I saw she has very, very few.