BOB HOPE & ARTHUR FREED.

  J. Stuart Blackton’s creaky 1933 March of the Movies, Cavalcanti’s mamoth 1942 Film & Realism and Boris Sagal’s 1953 De Mille film, The World’s Greatest Showman were once events in our film going. We dozed through Cinesound review’s ship launchings so we could see the Robert Youngston shorts in the News Theatre programs. Now material which is more polished and thoughtful is available at the touch of a keyboard. New participants don’t realise how lucky they are. In the Public Broadcasting - YouTube age we are spoiled for these. Part of Sheldon Epps' 1996 “Great Performances” series,  Musicals Great Musicals: The Arthur Freed Unit at MGM is a cheer-worthy attempt to highlight the success of MGM’s Freed Unit working from the thirties to the sixties. 

Singing in the Rain - Kelly, Mitchell, O'Connor

Director David M. Thompson's film acknowledges that other producers were on the lot. Jack Cummings did Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Viennese-leaning Joe Pasternak, whose idea of classical music they note with some derision, did The Great Caruso. Not all of the films used-to-be songwriter Freed produced were musicals - The Clock, Richard Brooks’ debut, Crisis, The Subterraneans - and not all of them were brilliant. I recall squirming through Little Nelly Kelly, Till The Clouds Roll By and Show Boat with only a packet of Jaffas as compensation. However from 1943’s Cabin in the Sky onwards, Freed’s policy of recruiting Broadway’s brightest increasingly paid off, particularly in deploying the talents of Vincente Minelli, Adolph Green and Betty Comden, Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen.  From Take Me Out to the Ball Game to Gigi, the MGM musical bloomed, defining the high entertainment scene of the day. Poor Busby Berkely was lost in the rush.

The documentary explains that, while other units were shunted around the bungalows, Freed occupied a wing of the Admin. Building with his office butted onto his associate’s, complete, with permanent piano disgorging the tunes that we still recall with such delight. This  comes spaced with survivor interviews -  Cyd Charisse, Biographer Hugh Fordin, Stanley Donen barely recognisable as the lithe young man in the off-set stills, André Previn, Comden & Green, Michael Kidd, Mickey Rooney, and with welcome extracts well reproduced. Collaborators like arranger Conrad Salinger are not ignored

Arthur Freed

In all this, Freed himself remains shadowy. Associates recall his avoiding the decisions he would leave to them, with the Millard Mitchell character in Singing in the Rain unable to visualise the Mickey Spillane ballet, a thinly disguised portrait - though they swear he is not. The Shirley Temple exploit is not mentioned.

Thompson’s film struggles to document the circumstances that produced the Freed musicals and pretty much gives up on explaining their disappearance in the wide screen era. It’s still a great pleasure to find so many participants sharing recollections that we also cherish. Possibly its most telling moment is Donen, whose break with Gene Kelly became acrimonious, saying that to produce such extraordinary results, extraordinary stresses were inevitable. We could have done a lot worse for a record of one of the high points in film production. Weeks after watching Musicals Great Musicals, I've got those long familiar numbers running round in my head again.

This one is accessible on the Singing in the Rain double disk.

 John Scheinfeld’s 2017 This Is Bob Hope is a top of the range two hour TV special in PBS’ American Masters series. I find it particularly rewarding because this one revives the enthusiasm I'd had for its subject, which had been eroded by slack observers and a notion of political correctness that sees Hope as part of a detested Right-Wing Establishment.

 Hope was one of the first movie personalities whose work I followed. I’ve been on his case for seven decades but this film told me things I didn’t know and explained some that had puzzled me - notably his declining popularity, by comparison with say Jerry Lewis - Jerry Lewis!

Hope arrives endorsed by people who know their subject firsthand. Associates and observers include Dick Cavett, Margaret Cho, Leonard Maltin, Conan O'Brien, Robert L. Mills, Brooke Shields, Richard Zoglin and Kermit the Frog. Woody Allen affirms his allegiance to a mentor who created the craven comic character Woody would develop and Allen generously shows that, where he needs dialogue, Hope got laughs with body language,  And in case you are about to interject, let me repeat Bill Maher's spontaneous observation  “Woody Allen isn’t guilty of anything.  Two trials found him innocent.  This is a country of laws!"

The film offers brief childhood material (“Bob hated his Youth”) that includes his being a “Movie Teller”, describing pictures he'd seen as in the Béatrice Bejo film.  Early on-stage photos (including his double act with George Burns) go with film of his first performances. Billy Crystal’s adept narration over mute footage describes Hope’s injecting topical material into Burlesque, making him, they claim, the originator of stand-up comedy.

With John Banks and Ralph Sanford

 There's coverage of his Broadway period (“Ballyhoo of 1932”) five shows in five years, moving to radio where instead of doing a script for six months he would do five scripts a week, recruiting one of the first writers’ rooms.  The Chesterfield Show set him up as a number one Radio star through the forties. It was this, rather than his two-reel comedies, that created a place for him in movies. The analysis of his signature “Thanks for the Memory” duet with Shirley Ross is touching. The film excerpts are generally impeccably chosen and reproduced. The films were and are the things that I was drawn to.

However parallel with these, Came Pearl Harbour and the continuing USO tours which have a resonance that doesn’t always come down the years. ”It wasn’t clear that D-Day was going to be a success.”  Hope went on with these into the Vietnam era where we see Richard Nixon telling him “We can’t lose South East Asia” and it was uncertain how his inspirational speaker material would play with that era's forces. “I’ve been in both combat zones - Vietnam and Berkley” The story of him turning to Connie Stevens and asking her to sing to the hostile audience, where she broke out in “Silent Night” and at the back a few voices joined in till the thousands of troops were singing, is irresistible - like the soldier at Hope's Life Time Award Presentation saying that he’d been one of the wheelchair cases that Hope had cleared officers out of the front of his show to place for a performance.

Rather as I did,  the film loses interest in his film career about there. They do include the touching Sorrowful Jones dialogue with young Mary Jane Saunders, a set piece in serious acting which I’d forgotten (well it has been seventy years!) and the routine with Jimmy Cagney in Eddie Foy and the Seven Little Foys, where Hope matches the veteran dancer step for step. I wouldn’t have minded a nod to the nice I’ll Take Sweden.

Seven Little Foys.

There’s as much as we need of Hope's sixty-year “model marriage” adopting four  children, where his wife came to terms with his philandering, and a TV career, successful while a lot of his contemporaries burned out in the Saturday Night Live era. We could have heard about the 1963-5 Bob Hope presents the Chrystler Theatre with episodes developed into the Eddy Foy Film and one by Sidney Pollack anticipating Von Richtofen & Brown or his superior turn as narrator on Project 20:Comedy in America.

Let's be grateful however. This Is Bob Hope does return Hope to the center of American Culture, prominent in a line between Mark Twain and John Stewart.  The program has a special resonance for me because it endorses a judgment I’d made unconsciously, way back at the point when I started to value this material. It’s really nice when that happens.

Reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDSbQo2KMhg

Nothing But the Truth. Bob Hope in his element, with Paulette Goddard

Barrie Pattison - 2024