Customer Reviews

Cancel My Reservation [VHS]

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This movie is truly one of Bob Hope's best movies. It is funny from the very start to the ending credits. The theme song is catchy with a great beat. Bob Hope and Eva Marie Saint are great together and have a comedy chemistry that can't be beat.

By 1972, critics, moviegoers and studio executives had tired of Bob Hope's increasingly lame comedies. "Cancel My Reservation" was definitely a last gasp, with Rapid Robert going through the motions in this painful adaptation of Louis L'Amour's "The Broken Gun." Hope already exhausted the murder-mystery angle in his earlier vehicles and the only laughs come from a series of surprise cameos. Unlike George Burns, it's a shame that Hope did not allow his comic persona to age gracefully.

In his final film (not counting two later cameos), Bob Hope stars as a TV talk show host on vacation who gets mixed up in murder and mayhem.
First of all, it should be noted this was his first film since 1969's dismal HOW TO COMMIT MARRIAGE, and was no great improvement. Hope's films had been suffering badly since the mid 60's: his delivery became increasingly wooden, the writing was getting sub-par, and worst of all, Phyllis Diller became his frequent partner in cinema crime.
She's not here in CANCEL, fortunately, but the film still suffers from an uneven plot and writing that awkwardly wavers from comic to dramatic, with Hope seeming ill at ease in both.
CANCEL does benefit from a decent supporting cast, with Eva Marie Saint as his discontent wife, Forrest Tucker and Ralph Bellamy as the bad guys, and Anne Archer (many years before FATAL ATTRACTION) as an indian local(!).
One of the films most bizarre moments may also be its funniest- a dream sequence where Hope is being put to death by an all-too-willing crowd that includes Bing Crosby, Flip Wilson, and, of all people, John Wayne.
The films' most appealing feature? The title song! You may be best off tuning in only for the beginning and the end of the film just to hear it...

Bob Hope was funny in the late 30s and 40s, a real comic original. By the 50s he was still funny but more predictable, and his movies were not as well written (or improvised). By the sixties, he was becoming a lame parody of himself. This movie is so bad that even before the title appears, you might be asking yourself if you'll be able to make it all the way through. His later comedies with Phyllis Diller were so bad they're good, so that's something, I suppose. But this one, Skidoo, How to Commit Marriage -- awful, awful, and more awful. A terrific comic (and primary influence on Woody Allen) ended up bullying his way onto the Tonight Show periodically just long enough to plug his latest fossilized special before disappearing again. If not for his many years of show-biz service to the US Armed Forces, his number would have been up 40 years ago. So skip this one and go back to the Road pictures, The Paleface, The Big Broadcast of 1938, and remember Hope when he was truly funny.