My Favorite Blonde (Blu-ray Review)
Format: Blu-ray Disc
Studio(s)Paramount Pictures (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)
Film/Program Grade: C+
The Ghost Breakers and the Hope-Crosby
Road to Singapore, Hope was on a roll. He was already a star of radio, and the decade offered audiences more than twenty opportunities to see Hope’s antics and laugh at his quips and wisecracks.
One of his most popular films of that period is
My Favorite Blonde, a spy drama/comedy that begins with a murder aboard a ship. It’s the work of Nazis chasing British agent Karen Bentley (Madeleine Carroll), who must deliver a brooch containing revised U.S. bomber flight plans to a fellow agent in Chicago, who in turn will deliver it to an air base in California. Trying to elude her pursuers, she slips into a vaudeville house where Larry Haines (Hope) is performing with his penguin, Percy. Larry is preparing to board a train for California, where Percy has been offered a lucrative job in the movies. Karen
Viewers now appreciate knights in battle, daring heroic stunts, horse riding, swashbuckling and rapier word play with a pinch of sorcery tossed in highlighted by the hilarious knighting of Hubert, his fight against Sir Griswold of MacElwain (Robert Middleton) and an army of midgets in tights storming the castle.
Kaye is in rare form with his singing, dancing and prat falling. His impressive supporting cast includes Angela Lansbury as a princess smitten with Hubert (oddly she is never asked to sing a song), Glynis Johns as one of the Fox’s captains and Hubert’s true love and Basil Rathbone as the villainous King’s adviser Lord Ravenhurst.
A couple that I know watches
White Christmas every year with the lady’s parents. When asked if she thought it was a musical of note, my friend’s reply was, “Not really. It’s more of a tradition.” So are full metal fruitcakes and glasses of cow juice left overnight by the fireplace in hopes that St. Nicholas soon will appear and drink it down before it curdles. The film has, admittedly, earned its place in history books as the first release shot in VistaVision, Paramount’s non-anamorphic widescreen answer to CinemaScope. It was also the biggest grossing film of 1954. But as a piece of filmmaking, the only things