"My Favorite Brunette" shows that the parodying of film genres did not start with Mel Brooks or even with the "Carry On" films. Ronnie Jackson is a San Francisco photographer specialising in taking pictures of babies. His great ambition, however, is to be a private detective, and hopes to be taken on as an assistant by Sam McCloud, a private eye whose offices are in the same building as Jackson's studio. McCloud has always resisted, but one day Jackson gets his big chance when he is mistaken for the great man by a potential client. A young woman named Carlotta Montay asks Jackson, whom she believes to be McCloud, to trace her elderly husband who has mysteriously disappeared. Jackson eagerly accepts the assignment.
The rest of the plot does not really matter. (It concerns a battle to control the mining rights to uranium deposits in South America). The whole point of the film is to parody the "film noir" style of film-making, particularly films based on "hardboiled" detective stories like "The Maltese Falcon" or "The Big Sleep". (I am informed that the film to which "My Favorite Brunette" bears the greatest resemblance is "Farewell My Lovely", which I have never seen). The film introduces a selection of stock characters from films of this type- apart from the private eye himself there is the sultry femme fatale (here played by Dorothy Lamour in a move away from her "sarong girl" image), the soft-spoken but sinister foreign villain (played by Peter Lorre, parodying the parts he played in "The Maltese Falcon", "The Man who Knew Too Much" and other films) and the wheelchair-bound old man (like General Sternwood in "The Big Sleep"). There is a typically convoluted noir plot, a gloomy Gothic mansion, a frantic car chase and the sort of cynical, slangy, wisecracking voice-over one could imagine being delivered by Humphrey Bogart. (The house is so big that "you could shoot quail in the hall").
The film's central joke is that, not only is Jackson not a private eye, he is also most unsuited to that particular line of work. He is a character of a sort played by Bob Hope in a number of his other comedies, the man who pretends to be tough, brave and resourceful but who in real life is both cowardly and inept. (In his work as a photographer he even allows himself to be terrorised by a baby).
Seen as a pure comedy, this is not the best, although there are a few amusing gags, such as the lunatic asylum inmates playing golf without a ball, Lon Chaney's musclebound but stupid warder, a joke at the expense of Hope's odd-shaped nose ("I'll personally punch you in the nose so hard it will look like other peoples' noses") and the scene where Hope, trying to record Lorre's confession to a murder, keeps pulling the plug out of the socket. Anyone, however, who is familiar with the conventions of the film noir genre will be amused by this affectionate parody. 6/10.
