The Crystal Ball

The Crystal Ball (United Artists) is an undressing contest between blonde, seductive Virginia Field and redheaded (for this film) Paulette Goddard. Miss Goddard does not take off quite as much as Miss Field, but she does it twice as often and eventually wins the prize (Ray Milland).

An uninhibited, involved comedy directed in the Preston Sturges manner by playful Elliott Nugent, the film casts Paulette as a shapely Texan who loses a beauty contest and somehow becomes a crystal gazer. This puts her in a practically perfect position to confuse her rival (Virginia) and convince her quarry (Ray) that his destiny wears red hair. These shenanigans occasionally achieve a quality of amiable screwiness.

They Got Me Covered (RKO Radio) is Bob Hope at par.

The film is almost 100% good, rich Hope, uncomplicated by music, choruses or rival gagsters. For support he has Dorothy Lamour, fully dressed for the first time since The Fleet's In, and a prepossessing newcomer--a Yugoslavian refugee named Lenore Aubert, who may make people forget Hedy Lamarr. There is also Mary Byrne, who left a job as a Washington secretary to play a Washington secretary. But in They Got Me Covered the girls merely serve as feeders for Bob Hope. The Young Master takes charge of nearly every scene.

The plot hangs on Hope's misadventures as a correspondent, beginning with his recall from Moscow because he was scooped on the Nazi invasion of Russia and going on to his efforts to outsmart an Axis spy ring in Washington. The devious chase leads him to boudoirs, Niagara Falls, a burlesque queen's bed, a beauty salon and finally to the spies' council of war in the salon showroom, where Hope tries to conceal himself by posing as a clothes dummy on a bicycle. His mugging in this perilous situation, marked by vain efforts to regain a dropped slipper and at the same time keep the treacherous bicycle bell quiet, makes a notable addition to the library of Hope classics in hilarity.

Troop Trouper. Hope has a chin like a snowplow, a nose that led Comic Fred Allen to describe him as "ski-snoot," and a trigger wit that produces a crop of studio stories with every Hope picture. This time, the first day on the set Hope took one look at Miss Lamour's fulsome costume--suit, blouse, stockings, etc.--and exclaimed: "For heaven's sakes, Dorothy, why don't you go home and take something off?" One sequence required him to kiss heavily lipsticked Dorothy three times. When the make-up man brought him a mirror, Hope, who looked as if he had been attacked with a bowie knife, cried: "What a lover! Is there a tourniquet in the house?"

Clearly evident in They Got Me Covered is the fact that 17 Hollywood pictures and hundreds of radio and Army camp performances have failed to dull Hope's zest for his work. Far & away the hardest-traveling Army camp trouper in Hollywood, he has visited so many camps in the last year (including a 16,000-mile Alaskan junket) that even his press agents have lost count.

He works on a round-the-clock schedule that would kill an ordinary man, has his telephones fitted with extra-long cords so he can pace up & down while he talks. He keeps seven writers busy helping him compose gags, has two filing cabinets jammed with jokes divided in three classifications: 1) "checked gags" (available for use)--sample: "I'm thinking of opening a large telephone booth with a drug counter in it"; 2) "unchecked gags" (needing further working on); 3) historic gags (which he never uses but collects for his own amusement).

Unspoiled by false modesty, Hope says: "I'll tell you what it is; I was born with timing and coordination, and I got seven writers. With their brains and my timing, we can't miss." His three-room office over his garage is packed with such proud possessions as a Jap Zero wing sent him by a Guadalcanal Marine. In England two radio hours are regarded almost as sacred periods, when no interruptions are tolerated: 1) the BBC news broadcasts, 2) Bob Hope's program.

He still takes a small boy's delight in his fans. One evening he rode up to a San Diego camp theater with a general in a jeep, hopped out, swaggered through a crowd of Marines and declared: "I don't know about you fellows, but I'm with the general." Whereupon the general stuck out his chest too, observed: "I don't know about you fellows, but I'm with Bob Hope."

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