Call Me Bwana (1963)

hyped garbage

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

She certainly seems to be enjoying herself to be fair. Mr Hope,taking a page from R.Hudson's superior "Man's Favourite sport", is an "expert" waiting to be found out. He pretends what we Brits back in the day called "An old Africa hand" on the strength of a memoir written by his uncle,and is tasked to recover a NASA satellite that has gone off piste and landed in the African jungle. The Russians are also looking for it,this time a foretaste of a R.Hudson film 20 - odd years later. But the Russians are genuine experts. So much for plot. Like most of Mr Hope's films,"Call me Bwana" is merely a vehicle for his gagging routines. That will either encourage you or turn you off. It has a lot of 1963 mildly political jokes (remember "The First Family" record Album?) that may mistify anyone coming across it today. Miss Eckberg doesn't have much trouble stealing the film,Mr Hope looks a little bit tired of it all. The Africans pretty much outsmart everybody which was novel for its time. I saw this at the "Odeon" Kemp Town before it became a more niche venue. Nowhere near so bad is it's made out to be without challenging "Some like it hot" in the 60's comedy stakes.

A US space probe returns from the moon and lands in Africa. The Americans call upon successful author Bob Hope (as Matthew "Matt" Merriwether) to retrieve the capsule, due to his books detailing the continent. He reluctantly answers his country's request, but Mr. Hope is a fraud; he's never been to Africa. The Russians are also interested in retrieving the probe. They send bosomy anthropologist Anita Ekberg (as Luba) to Africa, because she is "well equipped" to seduce Hope. Hope's traveling partner is attractive Edie Adams (as Frederica "Fred" Larsen) while Ms. Ekberg is accompanied by doctor "father" Lionel Jeffries (as Ezra Mungo).This could have been a fine Bob Hope movie, with more effort. It was produced by the team behind the "James Bond" series; however, it appears to be more cheaply made. The scenes taking place in Africa are obviously edited in; certainly, Hope and the cast did not go on location. This can work in comedy. However, this time it just looks cheap. The soundtrack is good, but becomes annoyingly repetitive. As a film, "Call me Bwana" appears to have been fully conceived during post-production...Hope was, by the 1960s, photographed with a shadow covering his head. This was the same shadow that was found over Joan Crawford's neck. In most films, Hope can be seen moving slightly out of the shadow's range. In this film, he is often way out of range - and can be seen with his colored, thinning hair. Even in the more harsh light, Hope's hair looks relatively nice, especially when compared to the full, obvious wigs his contemporaries were now wearing...Hope's comic persona and delivery make scenes like his arrival in Africa amusing. His topical humor does not age well, but students of history will recognize good fun poked at chair-rocking John F. Kennedy and shoe-pounding Nikita Khrushchev. A surreal encounter with golfing pal Arnold Palmer works as an "inside joke" - with some amusing bits for the uninitiated.**** Call Me Bwana (6/5/63) Gordon Douglas ~ Bob Hope, Anita Ekberg, Edie Adams, Lionel Jeffries

Wow...it's bad. A witless comedy that has Bob Hope, as a phony great white hunter, roped into finding a downed US space capsule in Africa. He's joined by smart spy Edie Adams and smart Russian spy Anita Ekberg. Hope has chemistry with neither lady. He bounces unfunny one-liner after unfunny one-liner off them (Ekberg appears to not be getting any of it) to no avail. A dismal comedy even among the very dismal comedies Hope made in the 1960s. Directed, unimaginatively, by Gordon Douglas and featuring a lot of rear screen projection and, for some inexplicable reason, a golf game between Hope and the young Arnold Palmer! The jerky editing, fast motion and goofy sound effects are for naught. Unfunny in-jokes (directed at Bing Crosby, JFK, Sinatra, etc) abound in this awful movie.

For years Bob Hope was one of cinema's most engaging presences, as classic comedies like "My Favorite Brunette/Blonde" and "The Princess And The Pirate" make clear even today. The lack of similar scripts in the 1960s didn't stop Bob from working, however, and the results were films like "Call Me Bwana" that diminished his legacy in a small but annoying way.As the politically incorrect title suggests, this is a safari-themed picture, with Bob playing Matthew Merriweather, a writer who palms off his uncle's memoirs of African adventure as his own while loafing around his Manhattan bachelor pad in a leopard-print bathrobe. Only everyone thinks he's on the level, which is a problem when a capsule crashes down in Africa and both the U.S. and the Soviets figure Merriweather's the only man to find it.The story is flimsy on many levels, but that's really not what's wrong here. Hope's not making "Out Of Africa," and the fact that the Frank Buck era of the Great White Explorer in Africa kind of ended by World War II is a minor nuisance, as is the fact its unlikely NASA couldn't find its own capsule with all the high-tech stuff they had even back then. No, you're supposed to enjoy this film as a vehicle for jokes. Only someone forgot the jokes.Hope just moseys through the film, his timing solid but firing blanks. "I'm here on a mission for the President of the United States," he tells a hostile-looking group of tribesmen. "You know, President Kennedy?" No reaction. "Bobby Kennedy? Teddy Kennedy? Jackie Kennedy? Caroline? Boy, these guys must be Republicans!"The attitude toward native Africans in this movie is not that bad. Hope's the buffoon, and for most of the film the black people around him are not targets as much as witnesses to his embarrassment. About the worst excess, other than the title, is when Hope makes a couple of porters carry his luggage on their heads, instead of toting them the normal way, because its more like what he's seen in "National Geographic."What's more off is the threadbare plot and a cast of supporting players who don't want to be there. Anita Ekberg and Edie Adams play rival spies in a sort of dull-eyed way. If it wasn't for Hope's joking about it so much you wouldn't know they were supposed to be sexy, but of course he does joke, and joke, and joke, about it. Lionel Jeffries is awkward in bad makeup and adds nothing as a nasty Soviet spy pretending to be a pious missionary who'd rather kill Merriweather than find the capsule. The best supporting performance is probably that of golfing legend Arnold Palmer, just for the way he enters the picture, a supremely silly but classic moment revisited in the Dan Ackroyd/Chevy Chase film "Spies Like Us." Unfortunately, the producers then have Palmer and Hope do ten minutes of random club-swinging in the middle of the picture, Hope making in-jokes about Bing while trying to cheat his way into looking respectable against Arnie. It's one thing to tack on a quick cameo; but the padding here really shows.Except there's nothing to pad. The whole movie is padded. Things happen, Hope makes a wisecrack, the scene changes, and everything we saw up to then is forgotten. At least a film set in Africa should be beautiful, but this is shot in such a cheap, offhanded manner it's almost distracting; its clear where the movie ends and the stock footage begins. The ending is particularly slipshod, which I couldn't spoil if I tried given I really have no idea what happened.Any Bob Hope comedy has the potential to be great, so when one fails to deliver as persistently as "Call Me Bwana," it really leaves one flat.