Caught in the Draft

Another box set I pulled out of storage is my Bob Hope set, which is really a repackaging of two sets, one of just him and one with six of the "Road" movies. Anyhow, I put one of the DVDs in and watched a new to me movie, Caught in the Draft.

Bob Hope plays Don Bolton, a Hollywood actor who has a fear of loud noises. This causes a problem because the film he's currently working on is a war picture; as you can guess there's all sorts of shooting of blanks where they can't just put the sound effects in in post-production. Meanwhile, visiting the set is Col. Fairbanks (Clarence Kolb) and his lovely daughter Antoinette (Dorothy Lamour). Bolton draws the erroneous conclusion that Fairbanks is just another extra. This starts him off on the wrong foot with the colonel, which is a problem because at the same time he experiences love at first sight with Antoinette.

Don plans to use any means he can to see Antoinette again, although she realizes what a phony he can be even if she does develop some feelings for him. There's a bigger problem on the horizon for Don, however. One morning at breakfast, he, his assistant Bert (Eddie Bracken), and his agent Steve (Lynne Overman) read in the paper that Congress is busy passing a law setting up a draft registry. (The movie was released about five months before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, sending the US into World War II and obviating this sort of plot device.) Needless to say, he's worried that he's going to be drafted immediately, although that ought to be a load of nonsense as it would take time for the bill to be signed by the President and then registration to be set up. Never mind the reasonable probablility that he wouldn't be drafted at all.

In any case, Don wants to find a way to get out of the draft, and realizes that one of the ways would be to get a deferment for marriage. He's chased a lot of women in his life, although for one reason or another, none of them is suitable for this. Except for maybe Antoinette. She might be open to the idea of marrying Don, but not as a means of Don getting out of the draft. With that in mind, Don has a nutty idea of setting up a phony enlistment sergeant who will declare Don unfit to serve because of that fear of loud noises. Antoinette has already seen through this ruse, too, and beats Don to the punch.

So Don has enlisted, and for some odd reason both Bert (who at least would certainly have been draft-eligible) and Steve both enlist too. None of them have any idea of what being in the army really entails. Don, at least, comes around to the idea that he'll have to be a good soldier in order to win the colonel's permission to let him marry Antoinette. The bad news is that everything he tries backfires in his face and goes spectacularly wrong. But this being a light romantic comedy, it's fairly obvious that Hope and Lamour are going to end up together in the end.

Caught in the Draft is a fairly formulaic movie in the sense that you can pretty much expect a lot of what transpires in the movie. I mean, there are only so many situations you can get into in basic training, and only so many ways in which things can go wrong. Also, Bob Hope was building his "coward" persona, so there's a limit on how that can be developed in the context of a service comedy. Indeed, while watching this I couldn't help but think that somebody like Jerry Lewis could be plugged into the movie and you could have done just as well. (Indeed, Martin and Lewis did At War With the Army a decade after Caught in the Draft.)

None of this means that the movie is bad. It's a perfectly adequate programmer, doing more or less what it sets out to do in being reasonably entertaining, certainly for audiences of the day, although people who aren't so into old movies will probably find it old-fashioned. Hope is adept at comedy and comes off well here; Lamour is lovely to look at as the female lead in a role that presents no challenges. Caught in the Draft is the sort of movie that's perfect for a box set if not the sort of movie you'd want to pay standalone prices for.