From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Raise Your Popcorn
Bob Hope, film star and postmodern pioneer.
In the 1920s, playwright Bertolt Brecht dealt with the political and intellectual complexities of German theater by overturning Aristotle's ancient mandate to suspend disbelief. In Brecht's theory, disbelief was welcome, detachment was required, and artifice was free to become the object of its own scrutiny. Today we know it as an aspect of postmodernism.
About the same time, Bob Hope, like every other comic in vaudeville, learned a useful lesson: When a sketch starts to tank, it's safer to make the audience part of the act than to pretend it isn't there. A well-timed wink or aside became every comic's way of acknowledging the illusion and telling the crowd that "I know that you know that I know this is all an act." Of course nobody called it "Brechtian" in vaudeville. It just got laughs, even when the material was pretty good.
Now that Jerry Seinfeld, David Letterman and others have made card-carrying postmodernists of us all, Mr. Hope's flourishes of deconstruction on television may seem tame and relatively commonplace. But his movie work is quite another matter. Mr. Hope made more than 50 films between 1938 and 1972, and many of them contain some of the boldest, most inconspicuously avant-garde strokes of postmodern sleight of hand ever seen on the screen. Yet, as he marked his 100th birthday last week, it all seemed lost in the kinescope clips of his TV career.
I'm not aware of any major Bob Hope film festival now in progress, and of the 284 cable movies listed in TV Guide last week, not a single one was a Hope picture. Only Universal Studios Home Video seems to have stepped to the plate with its "Bob Hope DVD Tribute Collection," a lively compilation of 17 films on 12 discs (at suggested retail price of $14.98 each) that makes it clear where Mr. Hope's most lasting legacy may ultimately lie.
After success on Broadway in the mid-1930s, Bob Hope branched into radio and movies and became a major star almost simultaneously in both. This produced two Bob Hopes--the fast talking radio comic who worked as Bob Hope and the movie actor who played schnooky characters resembling Bob Hope. The two fed off of each other from the start. His first film, "The Broadcast of 1938," was released in the spring of 1938 and featured "Thanks for the Memory." That fall the song became his radio theme when he started broadcasting for Pepsodent.
It was easy enough, of course, for the radio Hope to kid the movie Hope. It was when his movies started kidding back that the circuit between illusion and reality began to work in unexpected ways.
After several amusing but forgettable early films, Mr. Hope crossed into onscreen deconstruction in "My Favorite Blonde" (1942). Playing an out-of-work vaudevillian named Ronnie Jackson, he turns on a radio to make a racket and out comes, "How do you do, this is Bob Hope, the Pepsodent kid, and I'm here to tell ya . . . CLICK!" Mr. Hope's character switches it off saying, "I can't stand that guy."
Bing Crosby, who could never get away with such out-of-the-box business in his own pictures, also appears in a brief cameo, which draws a double take from Mr. Hope, a glance at the audience, and a perplexed, "Couldn't be." The pair had already bonded in two "Road" pictures (there would be five more by 1962) and teamed as whimsical off-screen rivals on radio and the golf course. In the self-referential grammar of the postmodern model, that cameo and a procession of other little absurdities suddenly reached outside the frame of the story and drew on viewers' larger media savvy as fed through other channels. It still seems terrible hip.
In films such as "The Princess and the Pirate" (1944), "Monsieur Beaucaire" (1946) and "Where There's Life" (1947), Mr. Hope created a basic film persona who embodied every man's urge to imagine himself as more than he is. When he looked in the mirror, which was often, he saw a dashing hero. When the audience looked at him, it saw a sniveling nincompoop. The laughs lay in the no-man's-land between self-image and substance. That's why we hear all the comparisons between Mr. Hope and Woody Allen, particularly from Mr. Allen. "I look more intellectual," Mr. Allen told his biographer Eric Lax in 1991, "but both of us have the same wellspring of humor."
Mr. Hope was a light comic, never a cartoonish one. He played the schnook with believable restraint, leaving the Marx Brothers, Jerry Lewis and Lou Costello to play the clowns. His films were parodies of other films done once too often--the swashbuckler, the western, the spy thriller. By distilling the clichés of whole genres, he created the matrix for "Blazing Saddles" and other more raunchy Mel Brooks parodies a generation later.
But after "My Favorite Blonde," Mr. Hope and his writers pressed much more deeply than Mr. Brooks into subverting the screen's dependence upon illusion. In his best work he stepped in and out of his screen characters at will in crypto-real inversions of reality and unreality. It was more than lobbing wisecracks over the fourth wall, a la Groucho Marx. In a Hope picture, not only the story but the medium itself became the target of self-commentary. "This is the screwiest picture I was ever in," says one camel to another in "The Road to Morocco," no doubt intent on beating critics to the punch. But the critics were on to the joke and seemed to appreciate what Variety called in 1942 "unorthodox film-making that . . . kid[s] . . . some of the film's 'weaknesses.' " Where else but in a Hope film would Crosby's big love song be introduced with: "He's going to sing, folks. Now is the time to go out and get the popcorn."
We laugh without noticing the wonder of it. In "Citizen Kane," overlapped dialogue was art. In the "Road" movies, it may have been bubbling verbal counterpoint, but it was still just shtick. I asked Mr. Hope once how he moved old vaudeville tricks to the screen. He didn't mention postmodernism once. He talked about involving the audience.
By far his most radical turn came at the end of "Casanova's Big Night" in 1954. With his head on the block and the guillotine dropping, the image suddenly freezes and a voice explains that, although Paramount would "like to see Mr. Hope's head roll into the basket," the star insisted on filming his own ending. The story then backs up a few minutes for Mr. Hope's version, in which he dispatches the villains, wins the girl, and then asks the audience to vote by holding up its popcorn. Such daring had been the privilege of animators like Max Fleischer and Chuck Jones, seldom live actors in major movies.
After 1954 Mr. Hope moved into less zany roles. "But his best films," notes Jeanine Basinger, chair of the film studies program at Wesleyan University, "are genuinely great films. While we probe the aesthetics of all this, he just knocked them off."
