My Favorite Blonde
                          
Director: Sidney Lanfield
Year: 1942
Rating: 6.5
It isn't a coincidence that Madeline Carroll was chosen to co-star in this war-time Bob Hope vehicle about spies. It is clearly a comical takeoff of the Alfred Hitchcock 1935 film The 39 Steps but here the genders are switched around. Carroll takes the masculine role while Hope takes on the reluctant feminine role. Ahead of its time really. They even have a scene in which to escape the cops they end up in a large meeting and Hope has to give a lecture. Carroll was the first cool beautiful blonde that became iconic in Hitchcock's films going forward. She appeared in his Secret Agent in 1936. She plays icy here as well - a woman on a mission that appears to be your basic Hitchcockian MacGuffin. Along the way Hope quips himself out of jams and danger and some of them are pretty good. "Let's get out of here before my knees beat themselves to death". That they fall for each other stretches even the fiction of film as they have no chemistry and one expects that five minutes after the film ends, he is back with the one he really loves - his penguin.

 

Yes, penguin. Hope is Haines in the Haines Percy vaudeville act. Percy is the trained penguin and gets most of the applause. Carroll is an English spy who is running away from a cabal of Nazi's after they killed her partner on board a ship. She has to get a tiny canister with vital information to California to stop thousands from being killed. Why she has to go all the way from New York to Los Angeles, I am not sure. This is America during the war. I am sure there were closer places to go. After them are two of my favorite nefarious character villains - the team of George Zucco and Gale Sondergaard. That is a lot of scary stares and threats.  She ends up in his dressing room and comes up with some cock & bull story to go with him on a train to Chicago to shake the Nazis. At first, the idea thrills him but he begins to suspect she is nuts. She secretly slips the canister to him and disappears - but Zucco sees the handoff and they try and kill him - then she is back and so on. All the while Hope trying to get rid of her. And poor Percy along for the ride. Across the country they go with Nazis right behind them.

 

It is a good mix of comedy, a little suspense and Carroll. Even Der Binger has a cameo that allows Hope one of his double takes. Another time Crosby comes on the radio and Haines has to turn it off saying, he doesn't like that guy. Some of his many quips land, some don't as is always the case but a good percent are good for a chuckle. Carroll was to take a five-year break after this film to devote herself to the war effort and then the post-war relief efforts. Hope cut way back on his film appearances - though Road to Morocco came out the same year - as he spent most of his time entertaining the troops. Everyone had to do their bit. After the war Hope made My Favorite Brunette with his old pal Dorothy Lamour.