The Old Gray Mayor

TCM had a double feature of Bob Hope films last night, both of which are on the Bob Hope box set I bought some time back, and one of which, Caught in the Draft, I blogged about not too awful long ago. I also mentioned recently that when I put my DVD of the James Cagney movie G Men into my DVR, I noticed that one of the extras was an early Hope two-reeler, The Old Gray Mayor. So, I probably should have blogged about it yesterday; instead, you're getting the post a day late.

As I said, this is pretty early in Hope's film career; about the fourth film in which he appeared and the early work was almost entirely shorts until The Big Broadcast of 1938. But still, a lot of the Hope persona that we'd see in later films is here. In this short, Hope plays Bob, who wants to mary Gwen (Ruth Hall credited as Ruth Blasco). However, it's the days in which a prospective groom was expected to ask the bride's father for permission to take the daughter's hand in marriage, which is going to be an issue.

Dad is the mayor, and he's famously irascible, to the point that he's literally just thrown another man out of his office as Bob is getting ready to bring up the marriage proposal. Worse for Bob is that the Mayor has other plans for marrying off his daughter. Dad wants her to marry for political purposes instead, to form an alliance with Alderman Mulligan (Lionel Stander, whose voice you couldn't mistake even if it weren't for the fact that there are only five names in the credits.

The first half of the short is at City Hall, first in the mayor's office and then a shtick with the marriage license clerk that goes on too long -- any idiot would have gotten out of there right away and eloped. But Dad is too clever for that, getting the taxi to go to his house and more or less keeping his daughter hostage. Bob is going to have to come up with a ruse to get Gwen.

The Old Gray Mayor isn't the best of Hope's works, not even the best of his early short. I think this is largely because the scenes all go on too long. We get the point already, as it were. Still, it's the sort of short that's nice to have as an extra, and nice for fans of Bob Hope to see him at the very beginning of his movie career.