'CALL ME BWANA' NEEDS A LITTLE TOUCH OF BING

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00149R000400080027-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 17, 1998
• Sequence Number: 27
• Publication Date: July 4, 1963
• Content Type: NSPR

"CALL ME BWANA"
ASTOR; KtP"S BAY AND PREMIERE
SHOWCASE THEATERS.
`Call McBwana'Needs
A Little Touch of Bing,
NEW YORK JUI. 4 f9611
iii. i S inrjti # 1 Approved For Release : CIA-RD
llrbert R. Broccoli, and Eon Produc-
tton relsesed through United Artists.
Running time: one Hour and 43 min.
es. With thee following cost:
Mtatt Merriwether...........Bob, Hope
Luba . ... .. ............Anita Ekberg
retlerlco Larsen.......... Edle Adams
Ezra Mun~o .............Lionel Jeffries
Arnold Pa m
Covt er..........Arnold Palmer
First Henchmen ......... Percv Herbert
. SDencer............Paul Carpenter
'Uta .. .. .Bari Janson
Chlof of Ekele Tribe..Orlando Martins
stand Henchman ........... At Mulock
By Judith Crist
off and running down tha
old "Road" comedy lc0el agai
with "Call Me Bwana"
almost, and that's not ba
nowadays, ,
This new Bob Hope comed,
does, in fact,. get off to
running start with the kin
of situation that sets the of
nostalgia aquiver and cries
for Crosby to enter the
picture. (He doesn't, n
even for.A fleeting sight gag,
more's the'pity.) Nate Mon-
aster and Johanna Harwood
have cooked up a' bit of
hokum that has Hope as a
world-famous African ex-
plorer who's actually a fraud
but gets sent oil a top level
CIA mission to the interior;
Anita Ekberg as the Soviet
Union's top anthropologist
and lady spy who's sent to
beat him to it; Edie Adams
as a CIA agent sent along to
afeguard Hopc, and Lionel
effries, that haunted civil
ervant of Peter Sellers
omedies, as a Soviet agent
posing as a medical mit.-
-The New'
Movies
liquidate rather than frus-
trate Hope.
And the way the plot gets
organized at the outset one
begins to wonder who could
ask for anything more. An
American moon probe. capsule
with vital data goes off
course on its return, landing
in Ekele territory. President
Kennedy himself decides that
Matthew Merriwether, the
only man to have survived life
with the Ekeles, is the man
to reclaim the capsule for the
U. S. A. Khrushchev himself
decides that the lovely an-
thropologist, Luba, Is to be
Merriwether's match.
As Merriwether, who's ac- ;
tually been cribbing material
from a long-dead uncle's
diaries, Hope is in his element.
He is the fatuous, wise-crack-
ing, egomanic, lecherous cow-
ard we know and love. His
New York menage Is too de- is
Ilcious to be described here"p
and his being equipped by?
the CIA with an all-contin-
gency suicide kit is a fine In-
terlude. And since in our cony '
temporary sex fetishes thg+
mammary glands have ion
replaced the sarong, Mill
Ekberg is a perfectly sati.t.
factory bit of cheesecake for
Hope to leap at, nibble 4';
CPYRGHT
and ultimately enjoy to the
full-in the moon capsule, n
less, on a world-wide televi-
sion circuit.
But the good start we're off
to is not sustained, despite
Hope's buffoonery and bettes'-
han-average patter, Jeffries'
onderful way with a sinister
plot and a veneer of godliness
and Miss Ekberg's literally
marvelous equipment. The
story meanders as much as
he safari does under Hope's
uidance: there's a gratuitous
and unfunny gdff match with
Arnold Palmer, tired gags
with elephants' and. nothing
or Miss Adams to 'do. Now
1 she were Bing Crosby-
But there are a few bright
oments and bright ? lines
tattered along the route;
here's a nice bit where a lion
tands in for Miss Ekberg in a
omantic moment with Hope
nd then stands in for Hope
Bob Hope advises his
effries. And when ` th
quartet finally arrive at th
kele village things perk up
articularly with a chief who
Sanitized - Approved For{Qee fali _.pe -1003
vv5't le capsule involves a bang
FOIAb3b
.CPYRGHT
CPYRGHT
CPYRGHT
et, to "Cpl! Me Bwana."
blast-off finale--spoiled by a
partidularly tasteless end
sight" gag that aspires to the
"Road" tradition.
Perhaps ,the tradition
~Wakea f8@ 2iF 41'e
Bwana; ' - the comedy, inter-
inittent,though.it 1g. is vin-