My Favorite Blonde (1942)

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.

My Favorite Blonde has in the title role Madeleine Carroll a most beautiful blond player, who is a British secret agent trying to get some microfilm about air routes for American planes to go to Great Britain as part of lend lease. But just as her boat is docking in New York, some nasty Nazi spies shoot her male companion. The microfilm is hidden in a pin that she's wearing and with the Nazis hot on her trail. she ducks into a vaudeville house which has Bob Hope and a roller skating penguin on the bill. I'm sure back in the day Hope played in vaudeville with many type acts like these. Vaudeville was moribund in those days and Hope wasn't helping to revive it.In fact he's got to get to Hollywood because some movie company wants to star the penguin in a film. That fits in real nice with Carroll's plans and as it usually goes, the bumbling Mr. Hope is in the clutches of a beautiful who actually falls for old ski nose as he tries to help her when she levels with him.My Favorite Blonde is a fast paced 78 minute film, one of the shortest of Hope's feature films. Carroll looks like she's enjoying spoofing a part she did in Alfred Hitchcock's 39 Steps across the pond. Of course she's the one dragooned into help.But it's Hope's show all the way. My favorite two sequences is both trying to sleep and feed the penguin in an upper on a train and when Hope and Carroll are at an Irish picnic in Chicago. James Burke and Edward Gargan are very funny as a pair of thick headed Irish teamsters.Though My Favorite Blonde is terribly dated with the World War II background the laughs still hold up very well.

This was an extremely silly (downright stupid in spots) farce of a comedy-adventure that gets by because it's so fast-moving and generally entertaining despite the cornball material.Even by Bob Hope standards - and his films were not the highlight of his incredible career - this film is not that funny. A major part of the problem is simply that the humor is too dated. This kind of slapstick isn't the clever stuff some of older silent comics performed, which is still great material. This is just plain dumb.The adventure part deals with Hope and British spy "Karen Bentley" (Madeline Carroll) and her attempts to stay one step ahead of the Nazis and the police as she transports valuable microfilm. Hope is along to help her and provide laughter.Hope's pet penguin was a lot funnier than Bob in this film. Dressed up in different outfits, the little creature was hilarious to view and made this film tolerable enough to sit through some 60 years later. In fact, this would have been a keeper if they had made the penguin the star, instead of the two dopey lead actors!

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.