utgard14 Pleasant comedy about a guy (Bob Hope) who has a vaudeville act with a penguin getting mixed up with a British secret agent (Madeleine Carroll). It's not the funniest comedy you ever saw but darned if it isn't one of the most likable. Hope and Carroll have nice chemistry and their banter is great. Lots of snappy lines. The villains are played by George Zucco and Gale Sondergaard. It's pretty much impossible to have a bad movie that features both Zucco and Sondergaard. Nice cameo from Bing Crosby. Very funny bit about halfway through between Edward Gargan and James Burke over who is really Mulrooney (watch and you'll see). It's a good comedy with a fun spy plot and a great cast.

bkoganbing My Favorite Blonde has in the title role Madeleine Carroll a most beautiful blond player, who is a British secret agent trying to get some microfilm about air routes for American planes to go to Great Britain as part of lend lease. But just as her boat is docking in New York, some nasty Nazi spies shoot her male companion. The microfilm is hidden in a pin that she's wearing and with the Nazis hot on her trail. she ducks into a vaudeville house which has Bob Hope and a roller skating penguin on the bill. I'm sure back in the day Hope played in vaudeville with many type acts like these. Vaudeville was moribund in those days and Hope wasn't helping to revive it.In fact he's got to get to Hollywood because some movie company wants to star the penguin in a film. That fits in real nice with Carroll's plans and as it usually goes, the bumbling Mr. Hope is in the clutches of a beautiful who actually falls for old ski nose as he tries to help her when she levels with him.My Favorite Blonde is a fast paced 78 minute film, one of the shortest of Hope's feature films. Carroll looks like she's enjoying spoofing a part she did in Alfred Hitchcock's 39 Steps across the pond. Of course she's the one dragooned into help.But it's Hope's show all the way. My favorite two sequences is both trying to sleep and feed the penguin in an upper on a train and when Hope and Carroll are at an Irish picnic in Chicago. James Burke and Edward Gargan are very funny as a pair of thick headed Irish teamsters.Though My Favorite Blonde is terribly dated with the World War II background the laughs still hold up very well.

David (Handlinghandel) Writing as someone who can definitely take or leave -- more likely leave -- Bob Hope, I call this a charmer. He is restrained here. Madeleine Carroll is a chic partner. The penguin I could do without but maybe that was fun for kids.I like some of the "Road" pictures and they're OK. Bing Crosby is way down near the bottom of stars in terms of my own preference. And Hope's politics -- well, it is hard to ignore them. This one is very different, though. Hope really plays a character, though he at times reverts to playing Bob Hope.The movie looks good and is well plotted.What puzzles me is that Gale Sondergaard, third-billed, seems to have almost no lines. At least in the print I saw she has very, very few.

bluheron1 Bob Hope was in his prime in this one, and once the roller coaster of laughs starts it doesn't quit for 90 minutes. It's a road format movie: Bob and Madeleine Carroll have to get across WWII America from New York to Los Angeles with secret plans before the Nazi spies intercept them. It's a formula plot but handled most inventively and Sidney Lansfield's competent comedic direction gives Bob a perfect opportunity to develop what became his trademark character. The scenes of Percy the Penguin loose on the train, the bus driver's picnic, Hope impersonating a child psychologist for a meeting of proper small town ladies - they're little miracles of laughter. If you don't think you like Bob Hope - try this one.