JohnHowardReid I'm surprised this one received such negative reviews. Despite an outlandish climax and a few gauche touches here and there, I thought it was Bob Hope's funniest film since "Son of Paleface" (1952). I particularly enjoyed the amusing tilts at some Very Top People. The support cast is great too. Lionel Jeffries is on hand to hand out some delightful extra mayhem, while Orlando Martins has a royal time as the tongue-in-cheek Chief of the Ekele Tribe. I'll readily admit that Anita Ekberg is a bit of a disappointment, but I guess she can't be persuaded to take all (or most of) her gear off all the time. A pity!

vincentlynch-moonoi To me, "Call Me Bwana" was the beginning of the serious slide in Bob Hope's film career, with the nadir being "Boy Did I Get A Wrong Number". Seeing these films, it's easy to forget that back in the 1940s and 1950s, Bob Hope put out some pretty decent films that were genuinely funny. Of course, we all think of the Road pictures with Bing, but there were plenty of other Hope treats over the years. So what happened? I think 2 things. First, Bob's best type of role was when he played a bit of a sap who rarely got the girl. It just worked. But as we moved into the 1960s, Hope seemed to get the idea -- perhaps part of a middle age itch -- that in films he ought to be more of an adult lover (in this film with Anita Eckberg). Well, I'm not saying it didn't work, but it didn't work well. The second issue was that Bob stopped acting and began delivering much of his dialog as he did one-liners.Beyond those problems, this film looks like a "throw-away". Let's produce a cheap film and rely simply on the names Bob Hope and Anita Eckberg. Let's not film a film about Africa in Africa, let's just do it with cheap sets on a film stage in England. If 20th Century Fox could make a film about Africa in 1939 that actually looked like it took place in Africa ("Stanley And Livingstone" with Spencer Tracy), couldn't United Artists do a little better with a film in the more modern era two and a half decades later? You can't say it was because Spencer Tracy was a bigger star, because in the world of comedy, few were bigger than Bob Hope. Yes, there was some stock footage that looked like Africa, but any of the scenes with the main actors were clearly on cheap sets. Audiences expect more.Hope was 60 years old when this picture was made. Maybe it was time to settle down and concentrate on television. Because, quite frankly, this film just isn't very funny.You've actually got a fairly decent cast here. Who was bigger than Hope? Eckerg was hot (!) in more ways than one. Edie Adams was quite talented (although probably more suited to television). And throw in an extended cameo by Arnold Palmer (maybe the most interesting part of the picture), and you've got possibilities...that were, unfortunately squandered. The "chase" scene is just plain dumb and looks so fake it's pathetic.All I can tell you is this. Every year or so I pull down the DVDs of the old Road pictures and savor them once again. I was pleased to be able to see this film 55 years after it was made, but only because was on cable, and I'll buy a DVD of it to pull off the shelf. Just not worth any investment of cash...unless you're a die hard Bob Hope fan. But, at least it's better than "Boy Did I Get A Wrong Number"!

JasparLamarCrabb Wow...it's bad. A witless comedy that has Bob Hope, as a phony great white hunter, roped into finding a downed US space capsule in Africa. He's joined by smart spy Edie Adams and smart Russian spy Anita Ekberg. Hope has chemistry with neither lady. He bounces unfunny one-liner after unfunny one-liner off them (Ekberg appears to not be getting any of it) to no avail. A dismal comedy even among the very dismal comedies Hope made in the 1960s. Directed, unimaginatively, by Gordon Douglas and featuring a lot of rear screen projection and, for some inexplicable reason, a golf game between Hope and the young Arnold Palmer! The jerky editing, fast motion and goofy sound effects are for naught. Unfunny in-jokes (directed at Bing Crosby, JFK, Sinatra, etc) abound in this awful movie.

Bill Slocum For years Bob Hope was one of cinema's most engaging presences, as classic comedies like "My Favorite Brunette/Blonde" and "The Princess And The Pirate" make clear even today. The lack of similar scripts in the 1960s didn't stop Bob from working, however, and the results were films like "Call Me Bwana" that diminished his legacy in a small but annoying way.As the politically incorrect title suggests, this is a safari-themed picture, with Bob playing Matthew Merriweather, a writer who palms off his uncle's memoirs of African adventure as his own while loafing around his Manhattan bachelor pad in a leopard-print bathrobe. Only everyone thinks he's on the level, which is a problem when a capsule crashes down in Africa and both the U.S. and the Soviets figure Merriweather's the only man to find it.The story is flimsy on many levels, but that's really not what's wrong here. Hope's not making "Out Of Africa," and the fact that the Frank Buck era of the Great White Explorer in Africa kind of ended by World War II is a minor nuisance, as is the fact its unlikely NASA couldn't find its own capsule with all the high-tech stuff they had even back then. No, you're supposed to enjoy this film as a vehicle for jokes. Only someone forgot the jokes.Hope just moseys through the film, his timing solid but firing blanks. "I'm here on a mission for the President of the United States," he tells a hostile-looking group of tribesmen. "You know, President Kennedy?" No reaction. "Bobby Kennedy? Teddy Kennedy? Jackie Kennedy? Caroline? Boy, these guys must be Republicans!"The attitude toward native Africans in this movie is not that bad. Hope's the buffoon, and for most of the film the black people around him are not targets as much as witnesses to his embarrassment. About the worst excess, other than the title, is when Hope makes a couple of porters carry his luggage on their heads, instead of toting them the normal way, because its more like what he's seen in "National Geographic."What's more off is the threadbare plot and a cast of supporting players who don't want to be there. Anita Ekberg and Edie Adams play rival spies in a sort of dull-eyed way. If it wasn't for Hope's joking about it so much you wouldn't know they were supposed to be sexy, but of course he does joke, and joke, and joke, about it. Lionel Jeffries is awkward in bad makeup and adds nothing as a nasty Soviet spy pretending to be a pious missionary who'd rather kill Merriweather than find the capsule. The best supporting performance is probably that of golfing legend Arnold Palmer, just for the way he enters the picture, a supremely silly but classic moment revisited in the Dan Ackroyd/Chevy Chase film "Spies Like Us." Unfortunately, the producers then have Palmer and Hope do ten minutes of random club-swinging in the middle of the picture, Hope making in-jokes about Bing while trying to cheat his way into looking respectable against Arnie. It's one thing to tack on a quick cameo; but the padding here really shows.Except there's nothing to pad. The whole movie is padded. Things happen, Hope makes a wisecrack, the scene changes, and everything we saw up to then is forgotten. At least a film set in Africa should be beautiful, but this is shot in such a cheap, offhanded manner it's almost distracting; its clear where the movie ends and the stock footage begins. The ending is particularly slipshod, which I couldn't spoil if I tried given I really have no idea what happened.Any Bob Hope comedy has the potential to be great, so when one fails to deliver as persistently as "Call Me Bwana," it really leaves one flat.