My favourite brunette

Ronnie Jackson (Bob Hope), a prisoner in San Quentin awaiting the death sentence recounts how he went from baby photographer to detective when the tenant across the hall, detective McLeod (Alan Ladd in an unbilled role), goes away for the weekend leaving Jackson in charge of the phones. Enter the eponymous beautiful brunette, Baroness Carlotta Montay (Dorothy Lamour), who throws herself on the mercy of Jackson (whom she’s mistaken for McLeod) to locate her kidnapped Uncle. Living his dream profession, Jackson’s first case leads him to question whether Carlotta is schizophrenic, whether the missing man is her Uncle or husband, whether men in wheelchairs can walk, and why everyone is intent on securing the map that Carlotta has entrusted to him. Feature a knife wielding Peter Lorre and a dippy Lon Chaney as a henchman at a Sanitarium. This tongue in cheek take on hard boiled detective films in the vein of Raymond Chandler is one of Hope’s three “My favourite” films, the others being “My favourite blond” and “My favorite spy”.