BY LEE PFEIFFER
Despite changing social tastes and values, America s love affair with Bob Hope ensured he continued his successful movie career throughout the 1960s, albeit with diminishing results. Perhaps the nadir of Hope s work on the big screen during this period is the 1965 production I ll Take Sweden , yet another sex-themed comedy of the era that can only be described as flaccid. Hope plays Bob Holcomb, a successful business executive and widower who is trying to provide a moral upbringing for his teenage daughter Jojo (Tuesday Weld.) However, Bob s viewpoints on the sexual revolution border on Puritanical. The most important mission in his life is preserving his daughter s virginity until she marries. When the film opens, Jojo and her ne re do well boyfriend Kenny Klinger (Frankie Avalon) announce to him that the intend to wed very soon, a prospect that sends Bob into a state of panic. Jojo isn t employed and Kenny s occupation is as an occasional rock n roll singer. Th
There s an old story about Groucho Marx. One day, when the Marx Brothers were still primarily a stage act, he was too ill to perform. Rather than cancel the show, he told little brother Zeppo, Just put on the glasses, paint on the moustache, and be me. You know the act. No one will know the difference.
So Zeppo takes the stage, and no one notices he s not the real Groucho, who keeps reporting in sick. Then, one night, Zeppo hears a familiar laugh from one of the boxes – it was Julius Henry Marx, the real Groucho. Of course, Zeppo asked him why he was in the seats, and not on stage. Because I ve never had a chance to see myself perform, he deadpanned back.
Origin
An age-old technique for mobilizing a populace to fight a war is to so thoroughly demonize the enemy that the conflict becomes seen by the public as a moral battle rather than a political one. This technique was used to maximum effect in America during World War I, when for the first time the U.S. was engaged as a late entrant in an overseas war, a war that many Americans wanted no part of. Accordingly, the Germans were recast as “Huns” to whom all sorts of atrocity tales were attributed, and suddenly everything Germanic became anathema.
In response, German-Americans sought to avoid being branded as disloyalists, traitors, or spies by declaring themselves to be Dutch or anglicizing their names, and common items with German names were retitled: sauerkraut became “victory cabbage,” hamburgers turned into “liberty sandwiches,” and “hamburger steak” was henceforth known as “Salisbury steak.” And a young comic named Julius Marx, who came from a German fam