The Crystal Ball (United Artists) is an undressing contest between blonde, seductive Virginia Field and redheaded (for this film) Paulette Goddard. Miss Goddard does not take off quite as much as Miss Field, but she does it twice as often and eventually wins the prize (Ray Milland).
An uninhibited, involved comedy directed in the Preston Sturges manner by playful Elliott Nugent, the film casts Paulette as a shapely Texan who loses a beauty contest and somehow becomes a crystal gazer. This puts her in a practically perfect position to confuse her rival (Virginia) and convince her quarry (Ray) that his destiny wears red hair. These shenanigans occasionally achieve a quality of amiable screwiness.
They Got Me Covered (RKO Radio) is Bob Hope at par.
The film is almost 100% good, rich Hope, uncomplicated by music, choruses or rival gagsters. For support he has Dorothy Lamour, fully dressed for the first time since The Fleet's In, and a prepossessing newcomer—a Yugoslavian refugee named Lenore Aubert, who may make people forget Hedy Lamarr. There is also Mary Byrne, who left a job as a Washington secretary to play a Washington secretary. But in They Got Me Covered the girls merely serve as feeders for Bob Hope. The Young Master takes charge of nearly every scene.
The plot hangs on Hope's misadventures as a correspondent, beginning with his recall from Moscow because he was scooped on the Nazi invasion of Russia and going on to his efforts to outsmart an Axis spy ring in Washington. The devious chase leads him to boudoirs, Niagara Falls, a burlesque queen's bed, a beauty salon and finally to the spies' council of war in the salon showroom, where Hope tries to conceal himself by posing as a clothes dummy on a bicycle. His mugging in this perilous situation, marked by vain efforts to regain a dropped slipper and at the same time keep the treacherous bicycle bell quiet, makes a notable addition to the library of Hope classics in hilarity.
Troop Trouper. Hope has a chin like a snowplow, a nose that led Comic Fred Allen to describe him as "ski-snoot," and a trigger wit that produces a crop of studio stories with every Hope picture. This time, the first day on the set Hope took one look at Miss Lamour's fulsome costume—suit, blouse, stockings, etc.—and exclaimed: "For heaven's sakes, Dorothy, why don't you go home and take something off?" One sequence required him to kiss heavily lipsticked Dorothy three times. When the make-up man brought him a mirror, Hope, who looked as if he had been attacked with a bowie knife, cried: "What a lover! Is there a tourniquet in the house?"
Clearly evident in They Got Me Covered is the fact that 17 Hollywood pictures and hundreds of radio and Army camp performances have failed to dull Hope's zest for his work. Far & away the hardest-traveling Army camp trouper in Hollywood, he has visited so many camps in the last year (including a 16,000-mile Alaskan junket) that even his press agents have lost count.