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Sorrowful Jones is both the first time Bob Hope teamed up with Lucille Ball as a leading lady and it's his first try at a Damon Runyon character. It succeeded, but it's not as good as some of the other of Bob Hope's Forties comedies.

This is a remake of Little Miss Marker where Adolphe Menjou played the role of Sorrowful Jones. The problem with this version is that in the first one the main character is the little girl left as a human marker for bookie Sorrowful Jones. The little girl back then was Shirley Temple and it was a Shirley Temple picture.

No child was going to steal the spotlight from Bob Hope and this one has the emphasis on Hope's character which is all wrong. Little Mary Jane Saunders is not Shirley Temple, but who is. Anyway she does not steal the film from Hope and that's wrong.

On the plus side Hope and Lucille Ball show some really good chemistry and they did far better in their next film together Fancy Pants. Also look for good performances from Bruce Cabot as the gambling kingpin and from William Demarest as Hope's sidekick.

But if you want to see Hope and Ball at their best I recommend Fancy Pants.

In this remake of the Shirley Temple vehicle "Little Miss Marker," a little girl is left as collateral for a racetrack bet. The good news is that it's a huge improvement over the terrible Temple film. The bad news is that it's still based on the same uninteresting Runyan story. As the little girl, Saunders is much easier to take than Temple. Unlike the earlier version, the focus here shifts from the little girl to the title character, which is a good thing as Hope is always fun to watch. Hope and Ball work well together although they don't get much help from the script here. The ending is far better than the corny finale to the earlier film.

Damon Runyon was another one of those writers whose work never transferred very successfully to the screen. Even the great Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald had troublesome films made from their novels. Runyon failed before with THE BIG STREET (Lucille Ball as a hard-boiled dame using Henry Fonda as a doormat) but had better luck when GUYS AND DOLLS transformed one of his works into a musical.

Here it fails once again to provide BOB HOPE and LUCILLE BALL with anything more than routine roles in this racetrack comedy about an unlikely man to chaperone a kid (MARY JANE SAUNDERS in the role originated by Shirley Temple in "Little Miss Marker"). Saunders is cute, but that's about it. She's no Temple and never went on to child star stardom as Temple did.

Sidney Lanfield directed a lot of lightweight films for Paramount, not all of them successful, and this has to be counted among his least likable comedies--unless, of course, you happen to be a fan of the stars and can watch them in anything.

Hope has some amusing one-liners as the man who takes a marker on a kid who becomes a big part of his life and Lucille Ball has a few quips of her own. Adolphe Menjou played the unsuitable man in the Temple film, with better and more believable results. Hope and Ball are simply killing time here and it shows.

The story, which depends so much on the charisma and appeal of a child star, simply hasn't got the strength to support Hope and Ball. This one's a real loser without the charm of the original.

Bob Hope stars as Sorrowful Jones in the second screen version of Damon Runyon's "Little Miss Marker". It's a bit of a move in terms of screen characterization for Hope, but not enough of one to upset his fans. There are still the sarcastic asides, self-deprecating and delusional, but the character has a sense of depression implicit in the name that Hope had not brought to other roles. He would expand on this for the next half dozen years, reaching the point where he could play carefully tailored real-life characters like Jimmy Walker and Eddie Foy, that showed his actual abilities as an actor, before he would become a bit stale in the late 1950s.

Although Hope would not adopt the. Fractured English that was a trademark of Runyon's Broadway characters -- only Tom Pedi does -- a competent cast, including Lucille Ball as her most sarcastic, William Demarest, and Thomas Gomez run ably with their parts. Only Mary Jane Saunders as the little girl suffers in comparison, but Shirley Temple had played the role in the first version, cute and bubbly and headstrong. Miss Saunders is simply sweet.

Damon Runyon's Little Miss Marker had already been filmed in 1934 as a Shirley Temple starrer, this remake changes the title and brings in the star power of Bob Hope and Lucille Ball, with great results.

Story has Hope as sly bookie Sorrowful Jones, who after accepting a five year old girl as a betting marker, gets lumbered with the child when her father is wasted by gangster Big Steve Holloway (Bruce Cabot). Initially a fish out of water with the kid, Sorrowful strikes up a loving relationship with her and aided by his ex-girlfriend, Gladys O'Neill (Ball), fights to keep the child out of an orphanage.

It's not - as some of the posters proclaim - funnier than Paleface (either of them since the sequel is better), in fact it's not close to the funny heights achieved by Hope's next Runyon adapted picture, The Lemon Drop Kid. However, Sorrowful Jones is funny, Hope gets to deliver some absolute corking lines that are guaranteed to at the least put a big grin on your face, but there's a semi-seriousness to it all which thankfully works a treat alongside the quips and wonderfully strange situations that Jones finds himself in. With a weighty support cast that also features William Demarest and Thomas Gomez helping things along, and young Mary Jane Saunders adorable beyond compare, this is a little cracker of a picture to brighten your day. 7/10