Casanova's Big Night (Paramount). "I'll scream for help," the lady protests, and no wonder. The Technicolored thing that has just waddled into her boudoir looks something like Louis XIV converted into a floor lamp. It turns out to be Bob Hope, cast as a sort of tailor's dummy who wishes he were man enough to fill Casanova's britches. And to the lady Hope replies (in a long, low-slung, sports-model voice that slides up to the listener's mental curb and honks suggestively): "I don't need any help."
The plain truth is that Hope (even with Joan Fontaine) does need help—a good bit more than he has been getting in recent pictures from his writers and directors. Despite the occasional funny moment when he can really become a floor lamp. Hope is essentially a radio comedian, a performer who is better heard than seen.
The humor of Hope as a balcony acrobat, for instance, has to be shown, even on the screen, more by what he says than in what he does. Give him a good line and he can throw it away with the electric unconcern of a stripper discarding the semifinal spangle, but it is not much fun when there is nothing in the line worth noticing. Typical Casanova gag line: ''Women are like oranges. When you've squeezed one. you've squeezed them all.''
Knock on Wood (Paramount), like Casanova, fails to fit a famous odd peg into the rectangular hole of the screen, but it is a much more entertaining try. The trouble with Danny Kaye as a movie comedian is that his humor is almost too graphic to photograph. Give him the wide-open spaces of a theater stage and like the prairie flower, he keeps growing wilder every hour. But confine him to the camera's cold, Technicolored eye and take away the living audience that gives him his reason for spreeing. and Kaye is not much better than his material — which is generally pretty good.
In Knock on Wood. Danny tries to give himself more room to whirl around in. Melvin Frank and Norman Panama wrote their script — and Kaye's talented wife Sylvia Fine contributed the specialty numbers — somewhat in the style of an aria with a few optional passages scattered along the way, at which points Danny could go into a comic Kayedenza if the inspiration came. And inspiration does come. One of the funniest parts of the picture is the scene in which Kaye. on the spur of the moment, becomes an automobile salesman sputtering trade talk ("overhead underslung oscillating compression decravinator") as if his teeth were a string of firecrackers.
The hero this time is a ventriloquist whose twin dummies have gone berserk. Whenever one of the little monsters sees the girl his master is about to marry, he insults her. Desperate, Danny consults a psychoanalyst and promptly pratfalls in love with the psychoanalyst's colleague (Mai Zetterling). Meanwhile, he has stumbled into more serious trouble. An international spy ring has stashed the stolen plans of a secret weapon in the heads of the dummies, and when two spies are killed in Danny's hotel room, the alarm goes out for the "redheaded ripper."