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Look, no movie that features Bob Hope doing what he does best and Rosemary Clooney is going to be entirely without any merits, but damn does Here Come the Girls come close. It’s a musical comedy without any memorable musical numbers or funny gags. Yet I still find myself welcoming any chance that I get to spend some time with Bob Hope, a man with a machine gun wit and delivery.
Here Come the Girls finds Hope, at fifty, playing a chorus-boy looking for his break, finding it in the seductive form of Arlene Dahl, finds himself continually blowing his big numbers, and there’s also Robert Strauss as a murderous gangster with an obsession with Dahl, Tony Martin shows up, and Clooney is mostly on the sidelines as the supportive friend clearly in love with Hope. The film noisily hums along on a formula we have seen done several time before, both for the better and worse. This wouldn’t be a problem with more of the jokes landed, or if the songs were better, but not even Clooney’s ace vocal work and skills as a comedienne can salvage them.
Hell, don’t even the fault the director, Claude Binyon. He tries to super-charge the energy and get the most bang out of the material. This goes a long way to patching over some of the script problems, but Here Come the Girls stars a comedy icon, one of the all-time greats, and it needed to be funnier. The parts are there, the pieces are decent enough individually, but they don’t add up to too much.
