The New Pictures

Caught in the Draft (Paramount) is, in a way, a triumph for Bob Hope.

Through three pictures, the lantern-jawed comic has made calf eyes at dusky Dorothy Lamour. Their effect on the sarongstress has led her to remark: "In Typhoon I had a chimpanzee. In Zanzibar I have Hope." This time he gets her--fully clad, for a change.

Owner of two swimming pools (one "last year's model"), star of He Kissed Her Twice and Bingo, Hope is cast as a craven, overpaid actor suffering from the approach of the draft. Marriage looks like his best out. but his selected victim, a colonel's daughter (Miss Lamour), suspects his intention. He stages a fake enlistment. It backfires him into the Army.

The process of making a corporal out of Rookie Hope (to prove that he is man enough to merit the colonel's daughter) consists of enrolling the comedian in each new attack outfit (tank corps, parachute troops, etc.) as it is formed, and letting the gags fall where they may. Some of them get up and walk, but many just lie there. Hope's view of it, after running a tank into the colonel's car: "Me trying to be a corporal! I'll be lucky if they don't try to take away my citizenship." Grade-A Hopeism, after the tank accident: "Terribly sorry about the car, sir.

I hope you haven't kept up the payments." Bob Hope has made twelve pictures to date (three of them this year), has five more lined up and waiting. He is on the NBC air every week for Pepsodent. If people grow weary of too much of Hope's stylized impudence, it will be largely due to the star's appealing avarice.

Physically, Bob Hope's biggest asset is his chin--a granitic abutment fit to warm the heart of any quarry-bound sculptor.

However, he seldom leads with it. Around the Paramount lot he is known as "a hard man with a dollar." This affinity for cash reveals itself in many small ways. On Hollywood's Lakeside Golf Club, where he customarily spends Sundays, he lays his bets with the guile of a shill operating a shell game.

This procedure, plus his capacity for shooting fanatical golf in the yos, nets him a pretty penny. But not from Bing Crosby. The crooner has bested him so often that Hope calls him Trader Horn.

Crosby also introduced Hope to the delights of horse racing. On their first day at the track together the jut-jawed comic ran wild. Placing $2 here, $2 there, he ran up a sizable wad of folding money. He had worked up a vigorous enthusiasm for the ponies when one-of his entries finished out of the money. Thereupon he decided that horse gambling was too uncertain for pleasure.

Despite his tendency to nurse a nickel like a sick child, Hope lives well. His white-brick, 15-room, English-farmhouse-style home, a drive and a mashie shot from Crosby's, lacks only a swimming pool to be the complete Hollywood home.

It houses his wife (Dolores Reade, onetime Manhattan nightclub torch singer) and two small children (adopted). At table the comic is amiable but jumpy, frequently telescoping courses on grounds that he is a very busy man. He eats well, worries about his weight and his manly appearance.

Most precious part of the Hope homestead is a stoutly bolted chamber adjoining his workroom. There, under lock and key, rests his joke file--insured for $25,000. Only Hope has the key. A long, bulky cabinet, it is divided into "accepted jokes," ready for use; "possible jokes," which need another rechecking before becoming accepted; and a miscellaneous category of wheezes as yet unscrutinized.

Each accepted joke is judiciously filed under such topical heads as "Easter Parade," "Mother's Day," "Bing Crosby," etc. This card-index Joe Miller has been invaluable in establishing Hope's reputation as an ad lib artist.

Often on the serious side off stage, Hope's suave tongue is pretty much the result of painstaking rehearsal. At the moment, he has a phalanx of six gagmen preparing his routines. They do his radio scripts, and most of his movie dialogue, although he himself polishes off the final copy. They rewrite the picture as it is filmed. When a Paramount writer popped in one day to see how Crosby & Hope were doing with his script, he departed moaning: "All they left was the scene of the action." To another cinema scripter who appeared on the set of Road to Singapore, Hope hollered: "If you hear any of your dialogue, yell 'Bingo.' "

As Don Gilbert, the cinema star, in Caught in the Draft, Hope remarks: "It's terrible what you have to go through to make a fortune." He meant it. Born Leslie Townes Hope, at Eltham, Kent, England, he was the fifth of seven sons of a stonemason who moved his family to Cleveland when Hope was four. There the youngster ran around with a tough gang of moppets sold newspapers, sang in a choir until his voice changed, left high school to clerk in a butcher shop, took up amateur boxing and "was knocked into a dancing career."

In 1925 the discredited comedian Fatty Arbuckle hired Hope and a friend to fill out his solo vaudeville act in a Cleveland theater. That sent Hope hoofing through the sticks until the manager of a frayed vaudeville house in New Castle, Ind. asked him to announce the next week's bill. He did it so comically that he promptly became a monologuist. From that time on, it was the rise of a typical hoofer.

Pinned down on the matter of his earnings last year, Hope barked: "You can say its about a quarter of a million and I don't like it." Now worth an estimated $800,000 (principally in annuities), he removes $6,000 weekly from Pepsodent's treasury (Crossley rating 26.5) and $100,000 to $150,000 a picture from the Hollywood mint. As if that were not enough, he found time last summer for an eight-week personal-appearance jaunt. His gross: about $20,000 a week.

Blossoms in the Dust (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) will acquaint most cinemaddicts with the fact that the late Cardinal Hayes, Lloyd George, Stonewall Jackson, Billy Sunday, Booker T. Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Presidents Andrew Jackson, Rutherford B. Hayes and James A. Garfield were orphans. Orphans are what Blossoms in the Dust is all about.

The best friend a Texas orphan ever had is Edna Gladney. Aged 55 and now resident in Fort Worth, she founded the Texas Children's Home & Aid Society, worked hard to persuade the Legislature to remove the stigma of illegitimacy from orphans and children born out of wedlock. She provides living documentation for Greer Carson's cinematic re-creation of her life and times.

The story begins in 1906 in the Gladney home in Wisconsin, where Edna's adopted sister commits suicide after her fiance's parents object to their marriage on grounds that she is an orphan. It continues through Edna's marriage to a Texas flour miller (Walter Pidgeon), the death of their young son and the eventual establishment of the Fort Worth home.

That this plot, hackneyed though true, turns out to be an acceptable motion picture is mainly due to the tasteful direction of Mervyn Le Roy and an eloquent performance by Miss Garson (Goodbye, Mr. Chips), whose green eyes, red hair and alabaster complexion make her a tech nicolor natural. Somewhat over-tearful and talky, Blossoms nevertheless manages to have its say without growing maudlin or boring. It probably sets an all-time high for Hollywood cinemoppets -- 750 of them play the blossoms in the dust.

Tight Shoes (Universal) is another cinemadventure into Damon Runyon's jocular cosmos (Three Wise Guys, Lady For A Day} whose offbeat inhabitants pursue their larcenous ways with the righteousness of rugged individualists and a language out of this world. As such, it is a bright little, daffy little farce which sparkles when it remains in Runyonland, falls on its face when it leaves home. Half the time it is on the road.

As Speedy Miller, immense Broderick Crawford plays a disarming mug with a one-cylinder brain whose stubborn vanity leads him to purchase a pair of fancy shoes that are too small for his feet. The punishment he undergoes persuades him to bet his own, his friends', his employer's and his stripteasing girlfriend's (Binnie Barnes) funds on Feet First, a horse which is strictly a hay bag and fails to win. The denouement has no point, and needs none.

Sample Runyon Broadwayese out of Crawford: "I'm downcast no end, boss.

... I would be kindly disposed toward a dollar, even if I had to work for it."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.