Chris,
Re your comments below:
> > [Hope's] "My Favorite Brunette" may be the
best
> private eye parody (of "Murder My Sweet")
ever
> filmed.
>
> *
>
> As soon as you use that word "best," you're
gonna
> have yourself an argument.
That wasn't my comment. It was Dick Lochte's. I was
piggy-backing off it remembering a line of V/O narration I
found both particularly funny, and typically Hope.
> For my money, I prefer the "Girl Hunt" number
in
> "The Band Wagon," with Fred Astaire as a Mike
Hammer
> caricature named Rod Riley and the following
lines
> of pseudo-tough narration (written by an
uncredited
> Alan Jay Lerner):
>
> "She came at me in sections. More curves than
a
> scenic railway."
>
> "She was bad, she was dangerous, I wouldn't
trust
> her any further than I could throw her -- but --
she
> was my kind of woman."
I like it, too, and, I think Mickey Spillane did as well. It
always struck me as more than a coincidence that his Mike
Hammer "comeback" novel was entitled THE GIRL HUNTERS.
> And shouldn't we also mention Daffy Duck in
the
> Robert Clampett-directed "Great Piggy Bank
Robbery"?
And who can forget the V/O narration from that classic? "She
had guilt written all over her face," muses Daffy, as we see
a close-up which shows that, by God, she really does have
guilt written all over her face.
> As long as we're talking "My Favorite
Brunette,"
> though, it might as well be noted that the
story's
> being told as a flashback from a jail cell counts
as
> parody of "Postman Always Rings Twice." Its plot
is
> kicked off by Hope's character, a baby
photographer,
> "minding the store" for a detective played
(in
> cameo) by Alan Ladd -- thus making it all a
reaction
> to such Ladd vehicles as "Blue Dahlia" and
the
> second "Glass Key." And, given that the plot
turns
> on Hope's specialized camera with its ability
to
> take photos through keyholes, you could easily
claim
> that "Brunette" is a film founded upon voyeurism
...
To a lesser degree, it also recalls MURDER, MY SWEET which is
told as a flashback from a police station where Marlowe is
undergoing a grilling.
Just before we're shown Alan Ladd as the "real" detective,
Hope tells Ladd's character that he wants to be a hard-boiled
private eye, "like Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell. And Alan
Ladd."
JIM DOHERTY
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