Blu Ray Review: Two more Bob Hope films from Kino Lorber

Kino Lorber has been steadily releasing nice blu ray editions of Bob Hope films, covering not only his heyday with the Road pictures and classics like My Favorite Brunette and The Paleface, but also his later post-war movies like Paris Holiday, and his early films before he hit movie stardom. The two late-30s features that Kino has most recently released are fascinating looks at Hope building his screen career after success in vaudeville, on Broadway, and with his own radio show.

THANKS FOR THE MEMORY

This movie, has Bob Hope teamed with Shirley Ross with whom he sang the Oscar winning song by this title in his feature film debut, The Big Broadcast of 1938 which had been released the previous February. This November, 1938 release features Hope as an ad man who quites his job to work on a novel but has a penchant for procrastinating and partying rather than focusing on his work. His wife, played by Shirley Ross, wants to get a job to help with finances, but her prideful husband husband is against it. She does so out of necessity and ends up working for her former fiancée, which causes another conflict. The Paramount brass wanted to team Hope and Ross in a film by this title in order to capitalize on its then-current hit status. Interestingly, the property they chose mirrors the forelorn lyrics of the song. It is not a brash, fast-talking comedy, but a drama about a couple who love each other but have issues that disrupt their connection. Both Hope and Ross turn in fine performances, and another duet, Two Sleepy People is one of the film’s highlights (it became a hit, though not at the level of Thanks for the Memory). Hope would not do this sort of romantic drama again until The Fact of Life with Lucille Ball in 1960. The screenplay for Thanks for the Memory is adapted by Lynn Sterling from the play Up Pops The Devil by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich who later penned The Thin Man and It’s a Wonderful Life. It benefits from supporting performances by Hedda Hopper, Charles Butterworth, Roscoe Karns, and Otto Krueger. It was once one of the Hope movies that was hardest to see, but is now on a nice blu ray with excellent commentary by Michael Schlesinger. It is available at this link: THANKS/MEMORY

NEVER SAY DIE

A much more typical Hope film from this period teams him with Martha Raye, with whom he was successfully paired in an earlier feature, Give Me a Sailor. This April, 1939 release has Hope playing a man who thinks he is dying. He saves a girl (Martha Raye) from suicide and they hastily marry, even though they are not in love and are actually smitten with others. Of course Hope wants out of the marriage once he realizes he is not going to die. There is something about Martha Raye’s delightful bombast and Bob Hope’s hilarious quips that meld cohesively in a ying-and-yang fashion, and while their films together were B movies they were making on the way up, the films contain many fun moments. A highlight of Never Say Die is a wordplay bit where Hope must remember some complex directions (a cross in the muzzle of the gun with the bullet, a nick on the handle of the pistol with a blank) that becomes amusingly confusing for him (he would do an even more complicated variation of this in The Paleface nearly ten years later). Paul Anthony Nelson and Lee Zachariah provide the enlightening commentary track, and Kino’s blu ray is from a 2K scan of the 35mm fine grain, so it looks terrific. It is available to order at this link: NEVER/DIE

These great Bob Hope features from early in his feature film career are essential to our better understanding of him as a comedian and actor. As with all of Kino’s many fine Bob Hope releases, each is most highly recommended for libraries, film research centers, collectors, and fans.