Balanced spoke movie

Samuel Goldwyn took superb comedy writers, a top-drawer comedy number one and top comic and distilled them into a farce of the broadest stripe. From time to time it takes and on it doesn’t.

An apparent endeavor by the writers to be super-funny has certainly resulted in a barrage of entertaining gags and situations, although lacking spontaneity. It’s just too clear how hard the boys were trying.

Bob Hope is pictured as a newspaperman who’s just been fired as a Moscow correspondent for completely missing the German invasion of Russia. He returns and goes to Washington in the hope of re-establishing his rep.

No asset to the film is the quality of much of the acting, particularly that of Dorothy Lamour, whose flat delivery of her lines makes Hope work twice as hard to sell his gags.

Director David Butler succeeds in keeping the film moving, although it is sometimes a battle against the episodic construction of the situation gags.