The Old Grey Mayor

A Warner Brothers VITAPHONE Short Subject.

THE OLD GREY MAYOR is furious when a brash young fellow tries to marry his daughter.

This very early film appearance by Bob Hope shows his persona already in rapid development: the slightly nervous gestures, the weird disguises, and the rapid fire gags. Helping push the dialogue along are George Watts as the bombastic mayor, Ruth Blasco as his pretty daughter, and Lionel Stander as a tough alderman. Hope nearly has the show stolen from him by Sam Wren, appearing as the off-the-wall manager of the Marriage License Bureau.

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Often overlooked or neglected today, the one and two-reel short subjects were useful to the Studios as important training grounds for new or burgeoning talents, both in front & behind the camera. The dynamics for creating a successful short subject was completely different from that of a feature length film, something akin to writing a topnotch short story rather than a novel. Economical to produce in terms of both budget & schedule and capable of portraying a wide range of material, short subjects were the perfect complement to the Studios' feature films.

Here's an early look at Bob Hope as Warner Brothers shows off one of their new young comedic talents. I wonder if that guy Hope ever made it in show business?

"I don't care if you are the mayor. I love your daughter and I am going to marry her." Those are the lines Bob is practicing outside the mayor's office." A few seconds later, somebody is thrown out of the mayor's office through the plate glass door. "I guess the mayor is in a nasty mood," Hope tells his girl. "Maybe I better write him a letter." To complicate matters, another guy - a smug wise guy - also wants to marry her and is good friends with the mayor.

Bob gets talked into seeing her father and then, after some exploding cigar scenes, he tells the mayor he intends the get the marriage license, whether he likes it or not!

A few phone calls by the mayor, however, make getting that license a very difficult thing, to say the least. Most of the lines from that point are extremely dated and corny, although I did laugh at Hope with his fake beard.

Overall, worth one look. It's a feature on the DVD of the James Cagney film, "G'Men."

Something very funny happened when Bob Hope filmed this movie, but unfortunately you won't see it *IN* the movie.

In "The Old Grey Mayor", Hope and Lionel Stander play rivals. The shooting script called for them to stand eyeball to eyeball and insult each other. Lionel Stander had one blue eye and one brown eye. When the camera rolled, Bob Hope found himself staring into Stander's mismatched eyeballs, and he couldn't keep a straight face. Hope kept "corpsing" (cracking up), and blowing all his takes. Finally the director had to reblock the scene so that Hope and Stander didn't stand so close to each other.

"The Old Grey Mayor" isn't very funny. What would REALLY be funny is the out-take footage of all those takes when Bob Hope kept laughing at Stander's eyeballs. Hope told this story about his encounter with Stander's eyeballs in his autobiography "Have Tux, Will Travel" (ghost-written by Pete Martin) but he didn't identify the movie in which it occurred.

One of the characters in this movie is identified in the dialogue as "A.K.". This is a mildly ribald Jewish joke. "A.K." is a euphemism for 'alter kocker', an unpleasant Yiddish epithet. That's about as funny as this movie gets.

A real early Bob Hope nice short The leading lady is very pretty well filmed a real clip from the time