Poseidon Quickies: "Private" Parts

Hello, my loves. I truly didn't intend to be away from posting for this long, but mid-August is quite a time in The Underworld. There's always a big, out-of-town work convention paired with my birthday, then a lot of catching up to do all around. This is a very minor offering, I'm afraid, but it's something to check in with until I can get back to my regular blathering. I recently watched, for the first time, a truly sorry Bob Hope comedy film called Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! (1966) and could barely get through it. It reminded me of another movie that Leonard Maltin once called "the worst" of Hope's flimsy 1960s efforts. It certainly isn't what I would call "good," but I nonetheless found The Private Navy of Sgt. O'Farrell (1968) a hell of a lot easier to sit through than Wrong Number.

The plot, such as it is, is rather thin. Set during WWII, the Japanese have bombed a U.S. tanker that was filled with Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, beer that was earmarked for the island on which Bob Hope is stationed. This buzz-killer (literally!) leads Hope to ask for some nurses to be assigned to the island in order to perk up the soldiers' morale...!

Hope assembles a band and gathers all the men together to welcome the arriving plane, complete with a ditty called "Welcome Pretty Lady."

All the servicemen are ready, willing and eager to meet the arriving nurse (only one could be spared at this time)...

Here she is, boys...! It turns out to be zany Phyllis Diller.

In other news, young Michael Burns has received a "Dear John" letter from his girl back home and is despondent over it. Hope tries to assuage his grief by flashing back to the time he fell in love in Hawaii, just before the war broke out.

Walking along the beach, he came upon the dazzling Miss Gina Lollobrigida.

I have always found bright, indirect sunlight to be most flattering and Lollobrigida looks smashing.

Hope is in complete agreement! However, there isn't a single thing about her look that speaks to 1941....!

But with a 41 year-old Lollo in this kind of condition, does anyone truly care?!

She's really got it goin' on in this movie.

It's a shame that this was the sort of movie she was landing at this stage, though Hope was famous for enticing glamorous women to costar with him in his loony opuses.

In a second flashback, she shows off another daring Pucci getup and, again, looks sensational in it.

Another part of Private that helps this movie go down easier is the presence of glorious Jeffrey Hunter.

As a fellow officer of Hope's, he's tan and lean and very soothing to the eye.

Speaking of eyes, his sparkling blue eyes pop from the screen (sometimes to a great degree when he's mugging comedically!)

Comedy isn't really one of Hunter's great strengths, but when you look like he did, a lot can be forgiven. As a sort of mama's boy in the movie, he is so desperate for love that he begins to have dreams about Diller...!

One dream has him (hideously bewigged) as a fig-leaf-clad Adam in the Garden of Eden.

And of course Diller is the tempting Eve.

I'm no Oral Roberts, but I don't think they got their Bible right...! Adam and Eve were nude UNTIL they bit into that apple. Then it was that they resorted to fig leaves to obscure their private parts...

It's a dorky sequence, but it gives us a look at most of his body, including some blurry tan lines.

Still not free of dreams and hallucinations about Diller, he soon finds himself talking to her when...

...she transforms into Cleopatra before his (searingly beautiful) eyes.

When the scenario with the nurses doesn't pan out, Hope turns his attention to recovering all the beer that was sunk. Director Norman Taurog (whose last film this was) is no Joshua Logan when it comes to packing a movie with beefcake. But there are occasional glimpses of tan, male physiques. (Among several familiar faces in the movie are - seen here - Robert Donner, the aforementioned Burns and William Christopher, who later costarred on MASH.)

For reasons known only to him, William Wellman Jr (son of the great director) almost never bothers to put a shirt on. But that's fine. The movie needs something other than the admittedly beautiful island scenery to hold our attention.

I have always felt that Hunter was an underappreciated actor as well as an underappreciated example of male beauty. It's hard to believe that this was his last American film.

While shooting Viva America (1969), a period gangster film made in Italy, he was injured in an explosion gone wrong. This, in conjunction with a reliance on alcohol, later led to a fall in his home and his death at only 42. In America, he wore a robe in his love scenes and only showed a hint of chest in one telephone sequence.

A prior film, the little-known Austrian-Italian Sexy Susan Sins Again (1968) was a randy romp in which he showed his torso off several times (for the final time in a movie.)

Speaking of randy... This foreign poster for O'Farrell tries to write a check that not only the movie doesn't cash, but which the audience never wanted to! LOL No one was screaming for Bob Hope to shimmy out of his pants like this. And note how it must have been a late-release, trying to piggyback onto the smash hit M*A*S*H (1970), whose Koren army medical setting has no relation to the WWII naval period of O'Farrell!

And that brings us to The End. See you soon with more nonsense!