I was never fond of Bob Hope. He was ubiquitous when I was growing up — TV specials, USO shows in Vietnam, celebrity golf-tourneys, beauty pageants –, and always the same: bland, smug, delivering one joke at a time that generally hinged on some insider allusion to Hollywood celebrity. I didn’t think he was funny. I avoided his movies most of my life. That changed with My Favorite Blonde. I was astonished that at least in that film Hope was not only a hilarious comedian, but an original one, maybe even with a touch of genius.
The film is a send-up of Hitchcock’s 39 Steps, substituting for Robert Donat’s debonair ordinary man swept unawares into a dangerous conspiracy Hope’s character, Larry Haines, a third-rate vaudevillian who works with a penguin. The screenplay is by Don Hartman and Frank Butler, a fine Paramount team who wrote much of Hope’s material. More interesting to me is that the story is by Melvin Frank and Norman Panama. I’m a big fan of Frank and Panama’s later work as both writers and directors with Danny Kaye (Knock on Wood, The Court Jester), and their script for the inexplicably neglected gems, Thank Your Lucky Stars and Callaway Went Thataway. Their specialty was comedies built on split or doubled personalities, sometimes inhabiting the same body, sometimes existing as exact replicas in the same world — one persona usually timid, the other recklessly confident. My Favorite Blonde was their first film story (it was commissioned by Hope, for whom the team had written radio scripts in the past) and Larry Haines may be the first of these comic types.
As a parody of The 39 Steps, My Favorite Blonde is deft and funny. Madeleine Carroll “reprises” her original role in Hitchcock’s film. She’s not a great comedienne and aside from a few short bursts, her presence in the film adds nothing but a touch of class. I don’t know much about Sydney Lanfield, the film’s director, yet. He was a solid director of B-pictures for Paramount and Fox. Charles Brackett considered him a hack, calling him “wretchedest of directors” in his journal. Maybe so, but in My Favorite Blonde he has chops — beginning with a very convincing, immersive Hatchplotian atmosphere, as secret British agent Karen Bentley (Carroll) evades a murderous crew of enemy operatives (the enemy is never named in the film but it’s clear they are Nazi spies — it’s 1942) determined to acquire secret plans for RAF bombers that she has in her possession.
By chance, she ducks into the stage door of a vaudeville theater and decides on the spot to plant the secret plans — hidden in a scorpion-shaped pin — on the randomly chosen Larry Haines. Meanwhile, Haines is onstage doing tricks with his penguin partner, Percy. Hope’s first appearance is wonderfully, fantastically ridiculous. He’s dressed to match Percy’s diminutive evening tails and top hat (natural for a penguin, n’est-ce pas?), but also to match Percy’s beak (a nice joke on Hope’s famous nose) and flightless wings, looking for all the world like a down-on-his-luck chorus member from Aristophanes’s The Birds.
The act itself is very funny — but even more so is the fact that Percy receives all the applause, much to Haines’s consternation. That’s the fact of Larry Haines’s life, as we discover that Percy has been offered a cushy gig in the movies while Larry’s only prospect is as Percy’s trainer for minimum Hollywood wage.
Larry encounters Karen waiting for him in his dressing room and he is dumbstruck, a randy clown in the presence of a gorgeous, high-class blonde. He must be dreaming.
The Hitchcock parody isn’t slavish, though certain scenes and characters from the original film are hilariously inverted. There are a couple of railway compartment scenes — the funniest has Percy escaping from his carrier and making the rounds in a sleeper car. The impromptu bullshit political speech Donat’s character has to make becomes Larry’s impromptu bullshit lecture on child psychology — one of the weaker scenes, but still funny. The loud quarrel between Donat and Carroll in 39 Steps becomes a hilarious donnybrook in a hotel room, as Larry convinces Karen that their only escape from their hunters is to have a violent marital fight that calls for police intervention. It’s Carroll’s funniest scene as Karen gets into the spirit of the mayhem.
The comic inversion that guides all the others is the gender role reversal: it’s Carroll’s Karen who forces Larry into hot situations, while Larry is as dithering as Donat’s Richard is chill. It’s a reversal that spins the story into screwball and slapstick territory. As soon as Larry is introduced every scene seems more inspired by Hal Roach than Hitchcock.
I don’t think I’ve seen another comic type like Hope’s. The smugness and blandness that Hope radiated in his elder years is full of twitchy neurotic energy here. As he once put it himself about his early characters, his patter is like a traveling salesman’s until trouble arrives. He’s girl crazy but timid; supremely confident but a coward; boundlessly optimistic but suspicious of everyone; a blue-streak talker with nothing to say; a would-be smoothie who is surprised by everything. Hope the comedian’s main tools, the one-line comeback and banal self-diminishing nonsequitur, become completely natural and appropriate with Larry Haines; he’s always dumbstruck by something, always behind the eight ball. He’s a funny guy, but all his humor is about himself — and he’s basically his only audience, too. (I can see now why Woody Allen holds him in high regard.) Later in his career, these things would become Hope’s lazy schtick. In My Favorite Blonde they are the building blocks of a bona fide screwball male character.
My allergy to Hope was relieved quite a bit by reading Scott Balczerzak’s book, Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity. Balczerzak observes that most of the male comedians in the classic Hollywood period represented themselves as buffoonish images of the dominant masculine ideals. They didn’t critique masculinity head-on; instead, they depicted “inadequate” masculinity. The comic irony lies in our awareness that for all that, they usually come out all right, solve the main problems or at least benefit from the solutions, and end up — miraculously, thanks to the Comic Spirit — in the right place at the right time, participating in and even effecting the happy ending. The thesis that this comic type was almost universal in the comedies of the 30s and 40s, is stunning in its simplicity. The male comedian of the era thrived on making fun of the masculine ideal of Hollywood itself, as well as of the putatively heroic male professions. Balczerzak focuses on the characters constructed by stand-alone comedians who carried them into their movies but his thesis has more general application. All screwball males fit the description, from the suavest (think Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby or William Powell in Libeled Lady) to the most typically “manly” (think of Gary Cooper in Ball of Fire, Joel McCrea’s films for Preston Sturges, or even Ralph Bellamy’s ubiquitous third-wheel suitor.)
In a sense, this is just another way of imagining comedy’s phallus game. The default starting point is that the lead male has the power of the phallus because… well, it’s obvious, right? Comedy — especially anarcho- and screwball comedy, but also any form in proximity to them — detaches the comic power and starts to spread it around. It plays hide and seek, peek-a-boo, keep-away with it — much to the surprise and chagrin of the male lead. The phallus often prefers women but animals, objects, body parts, even language itself may be its temporary domain. In a screwball happy ending the male lead usually gets to share in the phallus but not because of manly superiority. Buffoonish masculinity is a fine term for the way these phallically challenged “heroes” manifest for the audience the ridiculousness of hegemonic masculine ideals and the pleasure of not having to embody them.
Larry Haines is basically a man who has an erection for every attractive dame he sees, but it’s a zany zero-sum situation — every swoon over a girl leads to a lessening of phallic jam. He’s phallus deficient. The film is a hilarious carnival of the many ways in which this timid wolf has no control. It begins with his penguin partner, who gets the movie contract instead of him. Then it immediately shifts to the spy Karen Bentley, who impresses him into her plan while refusing to give him any information about it; he’s reluctant, but he can’t resist a beautiful woman. Karen pins the perilous scorpion-capsule on him without telling him — making him the object of a murderous chase that he can’t possibly understand. Or to put it another way, he bears the central fetish of the film — the “Scorpion” — completely unaware that he’s got it. The fetish has more control than he does. (Well, that’s the way it usually works, isn’t it?) Whenever the enemy spies get too close, Karen takes on a new identity to fool her pursuers, without informing Larry when and why she’s doing it, always leaving him bewildered. She keeps placing him in difficult situations that require him to improvise on the spot, which he’s not very good at. Larry Haines is a wonderfully conceived victim of the phallus game — his overactive testosterone is the reason he doesn’t have a phallus. In one of my favorite scenes, Larry and Karen are being stalked on a train by the evil spies. As Karen seduces him in order to pin the Scorpion under his lapel, Larry shifts at lightning speed from self-protective (and wise) refusal to acquiescing to the charms of the gorgeous blonde. Hope’s timing is masterful. Larry is split down the middle between his need to protect his ass and his weakness for a classy dame.
There’s even a nice scene in which Larry, determined to free himself from Karen and her caper, heads out like a strong and rational man, a real man. He’s no longer attired in his ludicrously wonderful clownish suit of clashing patterns. He’s wearing normal men’s clothes and he’s on his own, accompanying Percy, looking for the moment like Robert Donat. A noir-like internal dialogue ensues, but with each affirmation in his self-asserting self-talk, he takes a step back toward Karen. It’s subtle, it’s funny, and it’s unexpectedly — and foolishly — romantic.
Unlike Woody Allen, the young Hope doesn’t appear physically comical in his natural state; his default blandness and tastelessness can be transformed into a reasonable handsomeness with the right lighting and costumes. My Favorite Blonde gives him moments of rom-com masculinity — all the better to display how close that can come to the buffoonish. In the end, the clown gets the girl.
