"My Favorite Brunette" (1947)

This is one of my favorite movies; it never fails to make me laugh, and it perfectly parodies hardboiled detective stories like "The Maltese Falcon" or "The Big Sleep". Bob Hope plays an uncool baby photographer who gets mistaken for his neighbor, a very cool detective, and gets drawn into a case of murder! Dorothy Lamour plays the beautiful straight man pretty much perfectly.

Hope's...no. Bob's? That doesn't seem right. Mr. Hope's? Let's say Bob Hope's...genius is on full display here: his perfect timing, his big-framed gracefulness, his funhouse good looks that make him appealing but approachable. I think this is one of the best, most graceful comedic performances in movie history (and that's a short list, because it's the hardest thing to pull off. Chaplin, Cary Grant, the Marx Brothers, and...you're done). It's just funny, yo.

Peter Lorre portrays the Peter Lorre character with excellent comedic chops, and Lon Chaney Jr does the same with the Lon Chaney Jr role. They are a delight to watch.

This movie also features one of those precise movie moments that captures my fancy all out of proportion to its importance. I then try to explain these exquisite moments to other people and just come off sounding like an idiot desperate to join in the fun, like the person who gets all wound up to tell you this awesome joke and then the joke bombs.

But here it is: Bob Hope is running from the bad guys, and he runs up to an apartment building and rings all of the bells on the security intercom thingie in order to be let in. As he hits each button, he says, "Hi, honey, I'm home", for every button, ring it and, "Hi, honey, I'm home". And it totally works! These delighted female voices come out of the intercom murmuring things like, "Bill! I knew you'd come!", "Is that you, Dan?" But the bad guys are coming too quickly, so Bob Hope has to run off around the side of the building while the women keep cooing into the intercom and hitting their door-opening buttons.

That, to me, is hilarious.

Fuck! Told you these stories never work out! See the movie anyway; it's a gem.