Good start, but then it gets ruined

Dreadfully Boring

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

This film begins with one of the strangest casting decisions in film history. Roland Young is seen brutally strangling George Reeves! Considering that Young almost always played mousy men and was quite tiny and Reeves later went on to play Superman on TV, I had a chuckle at this scene! Next, you see Bob Hope escorting a Boy Scout-like group of kids on a cruise ship. He is soon met and befriended by the strangler. And, soon both see and are impressed by a pretty Duchess (Rhonda Fleming). However, none of them really know about the other. Of course they don't know that Young is a killer, but the Duchess is also quite broke and she thinks Hope is a millionaire who can save her! I won't say more, as it might spoil the movie.This movie is exactly what you'd expect from a Bob Hope film from this era--it's pleasant and enjoyable, though it's not what would call "laugh out loud funny". However, the card game scenes are pretty cute and made me smirk.By the way, the DVD from BCI Eclipse is only fair. The print is poor and there are no special features. I don't know if there is another company that has released this as well.

With the start of each Bob Hope movie, I begin my countdown as to when Bing Crosby might make a characteristic unscheduled appearance. So imagine my surprise when all of a sudden Jack Benny pops up in a typical skinflint role offering to change a hundred dollar bill for Hope's character. Hope's reaction to whether it was really the perennial thirty nine year old - "Naw, he wouldn't be traveling first class".You just had to be there during television's Golden Age to make much sense of that scene, which leads me to consider that modern day viewers miss a lot of the in jokes that comedians like Hope, Benny and Crosby were known and caricatured for back in the day. And you know something else? - they all did it without being off color or offensive, even if they managed to offer up a double entendre or three. That's why I keep going back to their films and TV specials, a neat time capsule reminder of life during a simpler time when we could all laugh at ourselves and each other without the politically correct deterrence of possibly offending someone. As for cameos, it probably wouldn't have passed for one at the time, because George Reeves hadn't achieved notoriety yet as the Man of Steel. However it was pretty cool to see him in an opening scene, even if it didn't end so well for his character. Now here's a line that had me doing some quick research. Duchess Alexandria (Rhonda Fleming) remarks to Freddie Hunter (Hope), that "Someday I hope to have seven little boys". It wasn't till some six years later that Hope would star in the biographical film "The Seven Little Foys" - a strange bit of cosmic serendipity. I wonder if Hope ever thought about that?The odd thing for me about the story had to do with Hope's alliance with the Boy Foresters in the picture; for all intents and purposes they were a knockoff of the Boy Scouts, with an oath that was somewhat similar. I wasn't counting, but Hope's character probably managed to break most of the rules regarding Forester behavior. The boys of course, try to keep him on the straight and narrow with mixed results. But then again, who wouldn't stray with Rhonda Fleming on board.With a title like "The Great Lover", one might expect a bit more in the romance department, but this one is played more for laughs and Hope's quick wit. It's not one of the legendary comedian's best or well known films, but Hope fans will enjoy it, and that after all, is why we tune in.

To me "The Great Lover" was the last great Hope film: he had some good lines, the plot was OK and most importantly Golden Age high production values were much in evidence. The nitrate gleams and is an essential component in the enjoyment of it, Hope and Fleming and the "ship" itself would not have looked as romantic on safety stock film. And the rot that set in with the advent of safety film in the early 1950's had already begun in TGL - just listen to those 2 inept songs, they wouldn't have got as far as being filmed even 5 years previously. The nadir was reached a few years later in "My favourite spy", with a seemingly endless Hope song as excruciating as anything Norman Wisdom could have performed, and utterly ruined an average film for me.I always counted Roland Young as a villain because I saw this first as a kid, whereas he was a pretty versatile actor and played plenty of goodies in his time too. He's a ruthless card sharper in this however, Roland Culver is a cold steely and "broke" aristocrat who Young wants to fleece, Fleming is his high class daughter the innocent Hope falls for. He in turn is leader of 7 little Boy Forresters with Grumpy as 2nd in command.Favourite bits: The morning exercises; Hope petulantly parping smoke through one of the boys bugles; getting distracted by Fleming over champagne as only Hope ever could. The bad bits: a/m songs to avoid. I leave the rest to you to find out!

I've always found it difficult to write anything lengthy or analytical about straight comedies. This is not because I don't enjoy them - nothing could be further from the truth, especially in the case of any offering which includes the talents of the great Bob Hope, with or without Crosby. The reason, I believe, lies in the fact that such pictures generally work only by reference to the viewer's direct involvement in them - rather like the experience of belly-laughing continuously for 45 minutes at the comedian's turn at a sportsmen's evening, but without being ever able to remember one gag afterwards. So often, the plot is all too familiar and holds no major surprises. The performances of the stars are generally what you would expect from them, and differ purely in the level of quality from picture to picture, and, for screen comics, the writing is invariably geared to their own particular talents.All this is true of "The Great Lover". Bob Hope is close to his very best as a scout leader returning by boat to America from Europe with his troop and drawn as Roland Young's stooge into murder, intrigue and, of course, romance. As in so many of his pictures of the forties and fifties, he plays a reluctant hero, a role which enables him to display the whole range of his trademark features - the mock cowardice, the way he controls his overheating in the romantic scenes, the witty asides and the cheeky but innocent double entendres.So what makes this picture different or special? In order to answer that, I watched the movie again before writing this review, but I still couldn't come up with a reason. Sure enough, the support playing is more than adequate, the plot simple but still interesting, and Hope is - well - Hope. He just does those things which you associate with him, but somehow the gags and his delivery always seem fresh and unforced and, despite the similarity in content, he always makes the material appear original. I can only therefore come to the conclusion that I like the film because it is a superior piece of Bob Hope work - and I like Bob Hope's work. That is the best recommendation I can give it.