Caught in the Draft (Paramount) is, in a way, a triumph for Bob Hope.
Through three pictures, the lantern-jawed comic has made calf eyes at dusky Dorothy Lamour. Their effect on the sarongstress has led her to remark: "In Typhoon I had a chimpanzee. In Zanzibar I have Hope." This time he gets her—fully clad, for a change.
Owner of two swimming pools (one "last year's model"), star of He Kissed Her Twice and Bingo, Hope is cast as a craven, overpaid actor suffering from the approach of the draft. Marriage looks like his best out. but his selected victim, a colonel's daughter (Miss Lamour), suspects his intention. He stages a fake enlistment. It backfires him into the Army.
The process of making a corporal out of Rookie Hope (to prove that he is man enough to merit the colonel's daughter) consists of enrolling the comedian in each new attack outfit (tank corps, parachute troops, etc.) as it is formed, and letting the gags fall where they may. Some of them get up and walk, but many just lie there. Hope's view of it, after running a tank into the colonel's car: "Me trying to be a corporal! I'll be lucky if they don't try to take away my citizenship." Grade-A Hopeism, after the tank accident: "Terribly sorry about the car, sir.
I hope you haven't kept up the payments." Bob Hope has made twelve pictures to date (three of them this year), has five more lined up and waiting. He is on the NBC air every week for Pepsodent. If people grow weary of too much of Hope's stylized impudence, it will be largely due to the star's appealing avarice.
Physically, Bob Hope's biggest asset is his chin—a granitic abutment fit to warm the heart of any quarry-bound sculptor.
However, he seldom leads with it. Around the Paramount lot he is known as "a hard man with a dollar." This affinity for cash reveals itself in many small ways. On Hollywood's Lakeside Golf Club, where he customarily spends Sundays, he lays his bets with the guile of a shill operating a shell game.
This procedure, plus his capacity for shooting fanatical golf in the yos, nets him a pretty penny. But not from Bing Crosby. The crooner has bested him so often that Hope calls him Trader Horn.
Crosby also introduced Hope to the delights of horse racing. On their first day at the track together the jut-jawed comic ran wild. Placing $2 here, $2 there, he ran up a sizable wad of folding money. He had worked up a vigorous enthusiasm for the ponies when one-of his entries finished out of the money. Thereupon he decided that horse gambling was too uncertain for pleasure.
Despite his tendency to nurse a nickel like a sick child, Hope lives well. His white-brick, 15-room, English-farmhouse-style home, a drive and a mashie shot from Crosby's, lacks only a swimming pool to be the complete Hollywood home.
It houses his wife (Dolores Reade, onetime Manhattan nightclub torch singer) and two small children (adopted). At table the comic is amiable but jumpy, frequently telescoping courses on grounds that he is a very busy man. He eats well, worries about his weight and his manly appearance.