BAROMETER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 554, 3 February 1950, Page 13

BAROMETER

_ (Paramount) { }{OPE and Crosby jointly have, I think, spoiled me for Hope and Crosby severally. Maybe it’s the sign of a debauched taste, this simultaneous craving for the dry and the sweet, but these days when I see the one I look for the other, and if he is not in evidence. my interest flags a little. And yet I don’t think that this is altogether an unreasonable prejudice. The two are each funny. in themselves, but they are also un‘doubtedly the cause of wit in one anand there even seem to be fewer jokes other and their solo petformances somehow lack the sparkle and spontaneity of their joint efforts, where a good deal of the humour has at least the appearance of being off the cuff. x The Great Lover is one of Hope’s solo excursions, and though it is by no means a forlorn Hope I can call to mind a number of occasions when I have been much more -helpless. with laughter. With Hope as the simple chaperone of a troop of Boy Foresters (a B.F. is truthful, brave and clean, and is never seen in the arms of any woman but -his mother), the film opens with vast possibilities fo good, clean fun, but somehow or other these are only partially realised. The stock situations get more in Hope’s way than do the Boy Foresters (as usual, he has to make frantie efforts to avoid seduction), many of his wisecracks cast their shadows .before, than usual. I noticed, too, that once again he makes much play with a slow double-take, or delayed reaction-a form of humour which was thrashed to death years ago by Edward Everett Horton. But where there is Hope let charity abide also-he’s still funnier than most. |