Geliebte Spionin

My Favorite Blonde has in the title role Madeleine Carroll a most beautiful blond player, who is a British secret agent trying to get some microfilm about air routes for American planes to go to Great Britain as part of lend lease. But just as her boat is docking in New York, some nasty Nazi spies shoot her male companion.

The microfilm is hidden in a pin that she's wearing and with the Nazis hot on her trail. she ducks into a vaudeville house which has Bob Hope and a roller skating penguin on the bill. I'm sure back in the day Hope played in vaudeville with many type acts like these. Vaudeville was moribund in those days and Hope wasn't helping to revive it.

In fact he's got to get to Hollywood because some movie company wants to star the penguin in a film. That fits in real nice with Carroll's plans and as it usually goes, the bumbling Mr. Hope is in the clutches of a beautiful who actually falls for old ski nose as he tries to help her when she levels with him.

My Favorite Blonde is a fast paced 78 minute film, one of the shortest of Hope's feature films. Carroll looks like she's enjoying spoofing a part she did in Alfred Hitchcock's 39 Steps across the pond. Of course she's the one dragooned into help.

But it's Hope's show all the way. My favorite two sequences is both trying to sleep and feed the penguin in an upper on a train and when Hope and Carroll are at an Irish picnic in Chicago. James Burke and Edward Gargan are very funny as a pair of thick headed Irish teamsters.

Though My Favorite Blonde is terribly dated with the World War II background the laughs still hold up very well.

My Favorite Blonde is not just one of Hope's very best films, but an excellent introduction for new fans. Hope's usual roles were as a vaudevillian or radio comedian who finds himself having to reluctantly participate in some dangerous intrigue which is way over his head, and this movie shows the formula at its cleanest and most smoothly executed. Madeleine Carroll plays a British agent delivering a coded message who has run afoul of Nazis operating in the U.S., and Hope, a ne'er do well road company performer who does an act with a penguin, meets her on a train and bravely (well, sort of bravely) pitches in to keep her safe. The cloak and dagger nonsense on the train is a deft nod to Carroll's star-making turn in The 39 Steps, and this movie has much of that earlier film's energy. Carroll and Hope banter amusingly as they are chased across half of the U.S. The bright dialogue is the film's best feature and Hope's reluctant hero persona, introduced in The Cat and The Canary and Ghost Breakers, is a fully polished comic gem at the the film's center. The look of the film is very 'film noir' with looming shadows and danger on staircases and other now-familiar devices, but it still comes off as fresh entertainment even now. This one movie alone was enough to convince me that Hope is one of the great comic actors in all of movie history and this is an excellent showcase of what he could do. Also a must see for fans of the deliciously sinister Gale Sondergaard, here at something near her best.

Larry Haines is a vaudeville entertainer who's act involves a roller skating penguin. He becomes entangled in a war time plot when British agent Karen Bentley is forced to use him as cover to help her get American bomber plans into the right hands and keep it safe from the Nazis.

It's a shame that this film has eluded me until the great man himself has actually died, but it was to mark his passing that this film got screened on television recently. The plot is largely meaningless but is good natured and involving enough to keep the film moving along as a thriller of sorts. However it is really no more than a nail from which to hang a series of quips, one liners and wise cracks from Bob Hope. These are scripted well and the film manages to be very funny even more than half a century later.

Hope is at his best here as the cowardly, self-depreciating performer who is sucked into the plot with his trademark unwillingness. His lines are still sharp and his delivery here is as good as some of his best work. Madeline Carroll was never going to be able to share the limelight with Hope given that she has to carry the plot side of the film, however she does really well and has some laughs herself. The nazis fail to make a significant mark in the film and I struggle to remember them other than stooges even a short time after watching the film.

Regardless of this, the film should and will be enjoyed for it's main selling point – the wise cracking comedy of Bob Hope. This film seems to be forgotten against some of his other works but it is a fine example of the wisecracks, jokes and delivery that made Bob Hope famous years after he left show business and will keep him famous for many more years yet.

I can't believe no one has reviewed this film until now. The teaming of Bob Hope and Madeleine Carroll in "My Favorite Blonde" is comic heaven. Madeleine Carroll shows a flair for comedy she was rarely allowed to display in her films.

"My Favorite Blonde" is funny, fast, and sharp in the banter between Hope and Carroll. Check out the scene where they get out of what appears to be certain capture: the most hilarious scene in the film. A fine supporting cast of Paramount contractees make this one of Bob Hope's best constructed comedies. It's plotting and editing make this even more of a road picture than the "Road" pictures, a precursor to "Romancing The Stone".

"My Favorite Blonde" seamlessly shows the mixing of '30's romantic comedy with World War II plots, something that would soon become obsolete as the war dragged on. Catch it whenever you can!

Pleasant comedy about a guy (Bob Hope) who has a vaudeville act with a penguin getting mixed up with a British secret agent (Madeleine Carroll). It's not the funniest comedy you ever saw but darned if it isn't one of the most likable. Hope and Carroll have nice chemistry and their banter is great. Lots of snappy lines. The villains are played by George Zucco and Gale Sondergaard. It's pretty much impossible to have a bad movie that features both Zucco and Sondergaard. Nice cameo from Bing Crosby. Very funny bit about halfway through between Edward Gargan and James Burke over who is really Mulrooney (watch and you'll see). It's a good comedy with a fun spy plot and a great cast.