but done repeatedly with footage of monkeys and apes, throughout the titles, and all set to comedy music! Think: the double-taking pigeon during the Venice chase in MR.
She's dubbed by Nikki van der Zyl, who provides her customary sweet, girlish voice - not really suited to Ekberg's physical persona here. Thank goodness that his dispute with Saltzman over money precluded him from further work on the Bonds.Įkberg looks heavily set and tired in this film, with shadows under her eyes. but even still.Ī god-awful score co-written by Monty Norman. Mildly mitigated by Hope's geniality, and of their time.
BOB HOPE MOVIE CALL ME BWANA SERIES
It's mostly like a series of cheap comedy sketches performed on 1950s live TV, and it's wholly dependent on Bob Hope's skill to hold it together. Stretches of this film are undeniably tedious. Director Gordon Douglas wasn't ever a Bond director, and the film has no one on the writing team in Richard Maibaum's league. 'Call Me Bwana' has none of the magic of Eon's Bond fare, whatsoever. Some moderately sexy frisson between Hope and Ekberg, and a breezy performance by Edie Adams as Hope's 'good girl' ally.Įdie Adams' brief scene doing some Cathy Gale-style ass-kicking. She's sexier than ever in her brief appearance in 'Call Me Bwana'. Mai Ling will be familiar to Bond fans as the attendant aboard Goldfinger's private jet, and as a 'bath girl' gracing scenes in YOLT including its title sequence. Not exactly Sylvia Trench, or Matt Helm's Lovey Kravezit, but in similar territory. The movie was shot at Pinewood, so the film's safari elements are provided through some use of stock footage and circus-trained animals passing for African wildlife.īob Hope's trademark deadpan delivery of semi-amusing one liners.Ī passably exciting sfx climax, involving Hope and Ekberg huddled together in the space capsule as its rockets fire and it propels itself, and a truck to which it's attached, through mountain roads at speed - then off into the sky.Ī sexy, but very short scene at the beginning of the film starring Mai Ling as Hope's semi-naked home help. 'Call Me Bwana' is a screwball-ish espionage comedy, starring Bob Hope as a phoney adventurer, Matt Merriwether, who is co-opted by the CIA to retrieve a space capsule that's landed in an African jungle - before Soviet agents, led by Anita Ekberg, can get their hands on it and steal its secrets. It's not for nothing that the Eon team behind FRWL substituted 'Niagara' with 'Call Me Bwana': 'Call Me Bwana' was itself an Eon movie, produced by Broccoli and Saltzman, edited by Peter Hunt, designed by Syd Cain, and co-written by Johanna Harwood with cinematography by Ted Moore, special effects by John Stears, and with Monty Norman sharing a credit for the musical soundtrack!
It was Marilyn Monroe's mouth in Fleming's original novel - as the movie poster described by Fleming was for Ms. The answer, of course, is that 'Call Me Bwana'(1963) will forever occupy a footnote in the history of the James Bond films as the movie whose poster features in FRWL (1963), concealing the hatchway to villain Krilencu's hideout in Istanbul: the Bulgar assassin is shot dead by Bond's ally, Kerim Bey, as he emerges through the image of Anita Ekberg's mouth. On the face of it, the question might well be asked: why open a post to review this obscure little film?
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