Thanks for the Memory

I've mentioned a couple of times that I picked up a big box set of Bob Hope movies. Some months back I watched The Big Broadcast of 1938, which introduced what would become Bob Hope's signature song, "Thanks for the Memories". In fact, the song was such a hit that Paramount rushed another movie into production for Hope and his female costar Shirley Ross to sing it again, and even called the movie Thanks for the Memory.

Bob Hope and Shirley Ross are the leads, playing recently married couple Steve and Ann Merrick. They're struggling financially, in part because old friends of theirs just show up randomly and eat them out of house and home. Among those friends are Biney (Charles Butterworth), Ann's old boss, and his girlfriend Polly (Hedda Hopper); there's also George Kent (Roscoe Karns), a sugar baby and gold digger who has married wealthy Mrs. Kent (Laura Hope Crews). Other random people show up, like Luella (Patricia Wilder), a southern transplant who falls in love with Steve and causes the romantic tension for the second half of the film.

I mentioned that Ann meets her former boss. That's in part because Steve has those old-fashioned notions that the man should be the breadwinner of the family. She had a well-paying job as a department store model of the sort you saw in old Hollywood movies, showing off the store's dresses to idle rich women. Steve has some sort of office job, but is spending his nights and weekends trying to write the Great American Novel. Ann thinks Steve might have something, so she talks to one of her contacts from her old job, publisher Gil Morrell (Otto Kruger), to read what Steve has written so far and do a review.

Gil suggests that Steve devote all of his time to writing, which is a bit of a problem considering he has a full-time job and wants to support Ann. Of course, Ann could always go back to work at the department store, which should make enough to support the both of them, while Steve can then work full-time on the book. There's also the possibility that Gil is interested romantically in Ann.

In any case, the couple switches the then traditional gender roles, with Ann working again and Steve both trying to write and keep house, the latter being the hook for the sort of humor you might expect about a man trying to be a househusband. More importantly, the change makes both of them a bit uncomfortable about their new roles, and with Steve alone more often giving Luella a chance to show up and be alone with him, there's that romantic conflict.

Thanks for the Memory is an odd little bird. There seemed to me a hodgepodge of genre types. Also, with everybody constantly showing up at the apartment unannounced, that felt more to me like the hook for the sort of sketch-based movie W.C. Fields was doing at Paramount at the time, not what Bob Hope was doing. The result is a film that has a lot of flaws, but one that is ultimately watchable in part because it's different, especially considering its late 1930s provenance. It's also the sort of movie that's perfect for a box set as opposed to a standalone DVD.

One more interesting note: in the opening scenes, Hope is shaving to head out for a night on the town with Ross, which enables the various guests to enter the apartment unannounced. Hope is wearing one of those tank-top undershirts that were common at the time, and it shows up some decided tan lines, which seemed odd to me for a Hollywood movie: