Directed by: Elliott Nugent

Starring: Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, Peter Lorre, Lon Chaney Jr., John Hoyt, Charles Dingle, Reginald Denny and Frank Puglia

STORY

Poor Ronnie Jackson.

He's a baby photographer who desperately wants to be a hard-boiled private detective.

There's only one tiny problem.

He isn't one.

But Ronnie works next door to real private detective Sam McCloud, and when McCloud leaves town, Ronnie agrees to keep an eye on his office.

Then beautiful and mysterious Carlotta Montay walks through the door.

She mistakes Ronnie for the detective.

Ronnie takes one look at Carlotta and decides correcting her would be highly overrated.

Suddenly our baby photographer is a private eye.

And suddenly he's in VERY BIG TROUBLE.

Carlotta needs help protecting her uncle, Baron Montay, and before Ronnie knows what has happened, he's tangled up with a sinister collection of villains, a valuable uranium mine, an encoded map, kidnapping, murder, a creepy mansion, an even creepier sanitarium — and Peter Lorre.

Never a comforting development.

Ronnie tries desperately to become the fearless detective he has always imagined himself to be.

Unfortunately, reality keeps reminding him that he is still Ronnie Jackson.

And we already know this adventure has gone spectacularly wrong because Ronnie tells us the story from...

DEATH ROW.

He's been convicted of murder.

He's awaiting execution.

And unless Ronnie can somehow straighten out this ridiculous mess, his brief career as a private detective is going to be considerably briefer than anticipated.

MY FAVORITE BRUNETTE is Bob Hope at his wisecracking best — a wonderfully funny spoof of film noir and hard-boiled detective movies that surrounds Hope and Dorothy Lamour with actors who normally would have scared the living daylights out of audiences.

This time, they're here to make us laugh.

AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS
BOB HOPE TAKES ON FILM NOIR

MY FAVORITE BRUNETTE gleefully sends up the hard-boiled detective movies that were flourishing during the 1940s.

Instead of Humphrey Bogart, we get Bob Hope.

Instead of an unflappable private detective, we get a terrified baby photographer who desperately wants everyone to believe he's tough.

And instead of escaping danger with cool sophistication...

Well...

It's Bob Hope.

The movie specifically spoofs films such as THE MALTESE FALCON, while playing with virtually every detective-movie ingredient it can find: the mysterious woman, sinister henchmen, shadowy rooms, kidnapping, coded information, murder and a hero who has absolutely no business being involved in any of it.

THAT IS REALLY ALAN LADD!

One of the movie's greatest inside jokes comes courtesy of Alan Ladd.

Ronnie Jackson dreams of becoming a tough private detective — the very kind of cool, dangerous screen character associated with stars like Ladd.

And who plays the REAL detective whose office is next door?

ALAN LADD.

He appears as Detective Sam McCloud in an uncredited cameo.

That means the movie doesn't merely parody the genre.

It actually invites one of the genre's stars into the joke.

WAIT UNTIL THE EXECUTIONER SHOWS UP

As if Alan Ladd weren't enough...

The executioner who arrives near the end of the picture is played by none other than:

BING CROSBY!

Crosby appears uncredited in a wonderful payoff to his long-running screen rivalry with Hope.

The joke becomes even better because audiences already knew Hope, Crosby and Dorothy Lamour as the trio at the center of the enormously popular ROAD pictures.

Put Bing Crosby anywhere near Bob Hope and somebody is going to get the last word.

Even on Death Row.

PETER LORRE — PERFECT CASTING

If you're going to parody 1940s crime pictures, who better to have lurking around than Peter Lorre?

Lorre plays the sinister Kismet, one of the men pursuing Ronnie and Carlotta.

His unmistakable voice, appearance and screen persona had already made him one of Hollywood's most memorable presences in mysteries, thrillers and crime pictures.

Here the movie gets to use all of that menace...

against Bob Hope.

Hope even gives the sinister Kismet the wonderfully inappropriate nickname:

“Cuddles.”

AND THEN THERE'S LON CHANEY JR.

Kismet's muscle is Willie, played by Lon Chaney Jr.

Yes — the man millions of moviegoers knew as THE WOLF MAN is chasing Bob Hope around a comedy.

And there's another movie-lover's joke buried in the casting.

Willie is an enormous, childlike strongman — deliberately recalling Chaney's famous performance as Lennie in OF MICE AND MEN.

So audiences who knew Chaney's earlier work were getting an extra joke.

A MAJOR FIRST FOR BOB HOPE

MY FAVORITE BRUNETTE wasn't simply another Bob Hope picture.

It was the FIRST production of Hope Enterprises, Inc.

Hope therefore wasn't merely the star.

He had a genuine stake in the production.

Bob Hope is also credited with contributing writing to the film's golf scenes.

Of COURSE he wrote the golf material!

HOPE + LAMOUR

Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour had one of Hollywood's great comedy partnerships.

By the time they made MY FAVORITE BRUNETTE, audiences already knew them together from the ROAD pictures with Bing Crosby.

The film even has fun with their star identities.

Their opening screen credits are presented on a florist's greeting card:

“From Bob Hope to Dorothy Lamour.”

DOROTHY LAMOUR TURNS THE TABLES

Hope was famous for his on-set joking, and Lamour had endured plenty of it.

During MY FAVORITE BRUNETTE, she apparently found a way to fight back.

Hope was known to chew gum to help his vocal cords. According to an account later related about the production, Lamour imitated his gum-chewing habit before one of their big screen kisses — and blew a bubble that burst over both of them.

Score one for Dorothy.

DOROTHY'S 35TH FILM

MY FAVORITE BRUNETTE marked Dorothy Lamour's 35th picture.

During production she also celebrated her 10th anniversary at Paramount.

LON CHANEY MOVES ON

The movie marked Lon Chaney Jr.'s first film after leaving Universal Pictures, the studio where he had become one of the great icons of classic horror.

Seeing him immediately deployed as comic muscle opposite Bob Hope makes his appearance even more fun for classic-film fans.

EDITH HEAD DRESSES DOROTHY IN GOLD

And not merely gold-colored fabric.

Costume legend Edith Head created one of Lamour's costumes using 14-karat gold-plated material.

According to contemporary studio publicity, it was made from the last of Paramount's supply of gold-plated cloth remaining from its pre-war stock.

Now THAT is an AINTOID!

THAT MANSION WAS REAL

The impressive mansion seen in the picture wasn't simply a Hollywood set.

Location work used the Paul Fagan mansion on California's Monterey Peninsula, reportedly a million-dollar property at the time.

Additional location filming was done in San Francisco.

SAN QUENTIN — RECREATED

Ronnie's predicament on Death Row required another substantial production effort.

The filmmakers recreated San Quentin's condemned row and gas chamber for the execution sequences.

Which is an extraordinary amount of realism to build around...

a Bob Hope punchline.

MY FAVORITE... BLONDE?

The title deliberately followed Hope's earlier hit MY FAVORITE BLONDE (1942).

But MY FAVORITE BRUNETTE isn't actually a continuation of that story.

It is essentially a sequel in title only.

During development, the new picture was even known at various points as MY FAVORITE BLONDE and THE PRIVATE EYE before becoming MY FAVORITE BRUNETTE.

A PERFECT HOLLYWOOD SPOOF

The reason MY FAVORITE BRUNETTE works so beautifully is that the filmmakers understood exactly what they were parodying.

The shadows look right.

The villains look right.

The mysterious woman looks right.

The mansion looks right.

Peter Lorre REALLY IS Peter Lorre.

Lon Chaney REALLY IS Lon Chaney.

Alan Ladd REALLY IS Alan Ladd.

Everything about the world says:

SERIOUS FILM NOIR.

And then they drop BOB HOPE into the middle of it.

That's the joke.

And nearly eighty years later...

IT STILL WORKS.