When Hope was young

“The girls call me ‘pilgrim’ because every time I dance with one, I make a little progress.”

Bob Hope to Paulette Goddard in 1940’s “The Ghost Breakers”

*

Woody Allen has confessed in interviews that he owes his screen persona of the cowardly, girl crazy neurotic to none other than Bob Hope. But for those who only know Hope from later, dreadful films such as “Cancel My Reservation” or the limp, tired TV specials he made in the last decades of his career, the idea that Allen would have been influenced by Hope seems like quite a stretch.

But during the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s and early ‘60s, Hope was one of the best and brightest of the film comedians, delivering one-liners with a rat-a-tat-tat precision while demonstrating some of the best timing on the screen.

After he starred with Paulette Goddard in the 1939 comedy thriller “The Cat and the Canary,” the box office hit that crystallized Hope’s screen character, Goddard’s husband, Charlie Chaplin, told him, “You’re one of the best timers of comedy I’ve ever seen.” And in “Bob Hope’s Road to Hollywood,” Bob Thomas of the Associated Press stated: “No comedian handles lines better.”

Still don’t believe it? Check out the L.A. Museum of Art’s three-week retrospective “Hope Springs Eternal: Bob Hope at 100,” which kicks off tonight with a rare screening of “The Cat and the Canary” and the underrated 1941 comedy “Caught in the Draft.”

Also screening during the retrospective (being held to observe Hope’s 100th birthday) will be two of the best “Road” pictures he made with Bing Crosby: “Road to Morocco” (1942) and “Road to Utopia” (1945), both on June 7; the western spoofs “The Paleface” (1948) and “Son of Paleface” (1952) on June 14; and the biopics “The Seven Little Foys” (1955), in which he plays vaudeville performer Eddie Foy, and “Beau James” (1957), which casts him as colorful New York Mayor Jimmy Walker. Both of those films conclude the festival on June 21.

Hope aficionado Mike Schlesinger, who wrote the programming notes for the retrospective and is vice president of Sony Pictures Repertory, says that Hope isn’t remembered for his movies in part because his later films were so bad, but also because he never changed with the times. “In the ‘70s, he was still telling the same jokes as he was 40 years before,” he says. (Allen has been criticized for not changing his persona now that he’s reached his late 60s.)

Hope contemporary George Burns did alter his act, Schlesinger says. Burns “would say, ‘People say why don’t I go out with women my own age and I say there are no women my age.’ He wasn’t doing the same jokes he was doing in the 1930s. When [Hope] made topical jokes in the 1940s, that could be kind of forgiven because they didn’t think those movies would be watched 60 years later, but by 1972, movies airing on television were well ensconced.”

Younger audiences, he says, grew up “with this image of this old guy standing next to Joey Heatherton telling these tired jokes to a bunch of soldiers. They haven’t seen ‘Caught in the Draft’ or ‘Son of Paleface’ and don’t realize just how outstandingly funny he was.”

Because he came out of vaudeville and Broadway, Hope was also a fine hoofer -- he once operated his own dance school -- and an equally adept singer who introduced two Oscar-winning best songs: “Thanks for the Memory” and “Buttons and Bows.” Hope also debuted the Oscar-nominated holiday tune, “Silver Bells.”

Schlesinger says he made a number of suggestions for the retrospective including “Caught in the Draft,” which casts Hope as a Hollywood star trying to evade the draft.

“I think it’s one of his buried treasures of the early part of his career,” says Schlesinger. “You got really incredibly funny actors bouncing off of each other. I think there’s a real magic there you don’t get in a lot of his other pictures where he doesn’t have really appropriate stooges. Lynne Overman and Eddie Bracken are a very effective counterbalance with Bob in the middle. Because he had two guys on either side of him, it sort of forced him to work harder and to give a better performance.”

“Son of Paleface,” Schlesinger says, is the peak achievement of Hope’s career, as well as for director Frank Tashlin, a former animation director at Warner Bros. In the sequel to “Paleface,” Hope plays the son of the frontier dentist he played in the 1948 original. This time around, he is a Harvard graduate who travels west to claim his inheritance. Roy Rogers and Jane Russell, from the original, also star. One of the best scenes finds Hope having to share a bed with Trigger.

“There is an example of someone working with a major talent behind the camera,” Schlesinger says. “Even though this was early in Tashlin’s directorial career, he still knew what he wanted to put on screen.”

Hope, who was host of the Oscars 17 times, would always joke during the telecast about never being nominated for or receiving an Oscar, although he did receive several honorary ones. He even proclaimed that the Academy Awards was called “Passover” at home.

It’s Hope’s fault that he’s underrated, according to Melville Shavelson, who began with Hope as a writer on his radio show and went on to co-write “Princess and the Pirate” (1944) and, with Jack Rose, “Seven Little Foys” and “Beau James.”

“When he had control of his pictures, he used the same formula as he did for his radio and television show,” says Shavelson, who directed “Foys” and

“Beau James.” “The more laughs he could get, the better he thought it was. He sacrificed everything for laughter. The pictures he made where he played somebody other than Bob Hope were the two biographies I made with him.”

Shavelson says that he believes “every comedian is first and foremost an actor. And Bob Hope is an actor and he was always ashamed of it. He thought that acting was beneath him in a sense. So that when he would play a serious scene, the minute the camera stopped turning he would do something to break up the crew. Without the laugh he didn’t know if he was on.”

One of the most dramatic moments in “Seven Little Foys” occurs when Foy is testifying in court in an attempt to keep custody of his seven children. “It had to be a very serious moment,” Shavelson says. It just so happened that the evening before the scene was to be shot, one of Hope’s best friends died. “Bob was really depressed ... he did [the scene] and partly because it was his mood, he played the scene very well.”

Perhaps the best-loved scene in “Seven Little Foys” is the dance number between Hope and James Cagney, reprising his Oscar-winning performance as George M. Cohan. Cagney, says Shavelson, was working on the Paramount lot when he and co-writer Rose visited him in his dressing room and asked about the scene.

“Cagney said, ‘I’ll do it on one condition: that you don’t pay me. When I was a starving chorus boy on Broadway, Eddie Foy used to take me up to his ranch and feed me and I never said thank you.’

“We said, ‘We are happy but it’s going to take a little rehearsal,’ and he said, ‘My dancing shoes are in the car.’ He went right to the dance studio. Hope heard about it and got frightened and went to get his dancing shoes, and he rehearsed the number for three weeks.

“Cagney was a challenge to him. Bob was 52 at the time, he could still dance and he did it very well.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Hope Springs Eternal: Bob Hope at 100

Where: Leo S. Bing Theater, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.

When: Fridays and Saturdays, 7:30 p.m.

Ends: June 21

Price: $8; $6 for museum and AFI members, seniors (62 and over) and students with valid ID.

Contact: (323) 857-6010

Schedule:

Today: “The Cat and the Canary” and “Caught in the Draft”

Saturday: “Road to Morocco” and “Road to Utopia”

June 13: “The Princess and the Pirate” and “My Favorite Brunette”

June 14: “The Paleface” and “Son of Paleface”

June 20: “Fancy Pants” and “The Facts of Life”

June 21: “The Seven Little Foys” and “Beau James”