Caught in the Draft (1941)

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Fresh and Exciting

Fantastic!

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Bob Hope plays a cowardly movie star who is afraid of being drafted. So he concocts a scheme to marry pretty Dorothy Lamour, in hopes of avoiding the draft. But general's daughter Dorothy figures him out and is disgusted by his cowardice. Having actually fallen for her, he comes up with another scheme to pretend to join the army to impress her, but it backfires and he finds himself actually enlisted. You can pretty much guess what will happen next. Decent WW2 comedy with the usual likable performances of Hope and Lamour. Eddie Bracken plays Bob's sidekick. It's a pleasant time-passer but nothing exceptional. It's fun to see Hope and Lamour in a movie without Bing Crosby. I kept expecting Bing to pop up and steal Dorothy away, as Bob rarely got the girl in their movies together.

Movie star Bob Hope is sensitive to loud noises—when shooting a war movie scene he expects the director to stage the battle silently and then put in the shooting sounds later. And so talk of the impending military draft soon has Bob and his agents Eddie Bracken and Lynne Overton discussing…marriage? Yes—avoiding the draft seems highly desirable, and a marriage deferment seems a likely strategy. Alas, having fallen for a colonel's daughter, a best-laid scheme to fake his enlistment goes awry and he finds himself a private after all. The bulk of the picture follows Hope's efforts to adapt to army life—and his continuing efforts to woo the girl he had originally hoped to marry as a means to deferment. Dorothy Lamour is quite lovely as the object of Hope's attentions; she's easy to root for as she tries to balance her affection for Bob with her loyalty to her military father, who understandably thinks Hope is an idiot. Clarence Kolb is excellent as the colonel—crusty and acerbic, he nevertheless displays love and grudging patience as well. Eddie Bracken is super as always as the buddy; Lynne Overman is good, too, as the agent who never quite forgets that Hope's safety is his own livelihood. There's plenty of typical Hope humor—"Of course I'm not a coward. I'm just allergic to bullets"—mixed in with doses of real patriotism from Dorothy: "How do you know? You can be scared and still be a hero. You know, some of the bravest men have been scared to death going over the top. But they kept on going."It would be a rare Hope movie without at least one winking reference signaling to the audience that we all know it's just a movie; here it's his comment when first glimpsing Lamour through a window: "Mmm, that's a bundle. She looks like Dorothy Lamour with clothes on."No, it's not as riotously funny as Buck Privates or as wisecrack-packed as My Favorite Brunette, but it's nevertheless a very pleasant and solid little picture.

For Bob Hope, in the 1940s, this is pretty routine stuff. Hope pretends to enlist in order to impress his girl friend, Dorothy Lamour, and winds up in the army by mistake. I don't know why this isn't funnier than it is. It has a cast of seasoned comedy actors, of which Lynn Overman is the best, with his dry Edgar-Buchanan wisecracks. The problem is with the script. It has a ground-out quality. Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Mickey Rooney -- everyone seemed to be making the same movie, and this role could have been handed over to anyone. Hope is an extremely funny guy in the right context but this isn't the context. The script is unimaginative. The direction by David Butler is leaden. There are long pauses after a gag, before the dissolve, while the audience is supposed to be laughing. It seems at times that eons come and go, dynasties rise and fall, geological epochs pass, while we wait for the dissolve to the next scene in a silent room. Hope was a lot better later on, especially in the Road movies with Bing Crosby to play off. And he would be much better by himself too, in such outings as "My Favorite Spy." This one is worth watching and at times is engaging fun, but, for Hope, strictly by the book.

I saw this movie when it was re-released as a supporting feature at a cinema here in Melbourne about 1951. Don't remember much about it, except the scene where the hero (Hope) loses control of a tank and runs it into the side of the colonel's Cadillac limo (it might have been a Chrysler) but the audience was appalled, as I was, because luxury cars like this were rarely seen here in those years. It wasn't faked either, as I recall. Can someone advise what the car was? I'm compiling a list of cars used in the movies. Apart from that I thought it was a quite passable comedy and I'm hoping it might come up on late-nite TV sometime as they have occasionally shown other Paramount movies of the era. TT.