4/19/2023 0 Comments The court jester 1955 tcmSome of this can be blamed-as it often can-on a performer becoming too powerful and being given too much control over his career. As one of the few people I know who has seen most of Hope’s short films and all of his features (yes, even the elusive 1943 musical-comedy Let’s Face It and the rightfully disdained 1956 attempt to team him with Katharine Hepburn, The Iron Petticoat), I have a pretty good working knowledge of his filmography, and just how bad it got. It’s impossible to deny that Hope made a lot of bad movies-not just bad, but embarassingly bad. Not only did he persist in churning out increasingly lame movies up through 1972 with the dismal Cancel My Reservation, but his increasingly hawkish right-wing stance managed to alienate a lot of young film buffs at the very time they were discovering and lionizing classic comedy performers like the Marx Brothers, Mae West and W.C. The man had about nine solid years of greatness, followed by a few years with flashes of brilliance-and then a lot of mediocrity and worse. Truth is there’s really no one but Hope himself to blame. To the degree that Bob Hope is remembered today-and I suspect that gets less all the time-it seems to usually be with derision. But there was a time when Hope was a major figure in film comedy, and that’s worth remembering. Maybe that’s fair, though, since perhaps no one ever put so much energy into creating an iconic public persona and then so tenaciously destroyed that image by not knowing when to quit. This Sunday (August 8) TCM offers a truly perplexing mix of some of the best and a lot of the absolute worst of Bob Hope. A few weeks ago Universal put out a pretty nice set of Bob Hope movies.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |