I’LL TAKE SWEDEN
US, 1965, 96 minutes, Colour.
Bob Hope, Tuesday Weld, Frankie Avalon, Dina Merrill, Jeremy Slate.
Directed by Frederick de Cordova.
What is Bob Hope doing in a kind of beach blanket bingo musical comedy?
Bob Hope had been appearing in comedies for 30 years, adapting his style to the various decades, but always using his somewhat deadpan character, full of double takes, full of innuendo.his timing, usually impeccable. just before I’ll take Sweden, he made call me Obewana, something of an old-time hope vehicle, not too strong on plot, but giving hope every opportunity for wisecracks, innuendo, and farcical comedy, supported by Anita Ekberg, Edie Adams and Lionel Jeffries.
But this film is quite different.Hope has been persuaded to join the younger generation of the mid-60s. and they don’t quite fit together.
If ever a film was dated, it is this one. The dialogue, especially for Frankie Avalon’s character, is full of the youngsters’ jargon of the time, sounds grating and artificial half a century later. So, the behaviour of the young people, self-absorbed in their dancing and the variation of twist movements ignore adults, enjoying the musical style of the times and its beat, especially in the title song I’ll Take Sweden, no way memorable, more than a touch ludicrous in its lyrics.
The basic story is of a widower, a protective father concerned about his teenage daughter. She is played by Tuesday Weld. And she is in love with Frankie Avalon, reprising his persona of so many other beach party films of the times. Dad takes a job in Sweden, taking his daughter to protect her, putting off her boyfriend whom he has already encountered in some comic situations, especially on the back of a motorbike and visiting his cramped trailer and getting trapped in the folding bed! In Sweden, his resentful daughter begins to fall in love with an assistant in the company, Jeremy Slate, with a faux Swedish accent. This works and then dad wants to rescue her from his assistant and calls Frankie Avalon to Sweden.
In the meantime, he has met a charming Swedish woman, Dina Merrill, also with a faux Swedish accent. And the film takes up the permissiveness of the time in so far as dad is disapproving of his daughter having a relationship with the young man while he is having a relationship with the older woman. It is a 1960s theme of double standards.
Things come to a head when dad and his friend pretend to be in Switzerland and have a rendezvous at a local hotel which is where dad’s assistant brings the daughter. There is some farcical searching for rooms in the hotel, and a quick resolution whereby dad is able to marry his friend, Frankie Avalon comes to the rescue again for the daughter, and the Swedish assistant is able to marry the girl who is in love with him.
The film is not really worth seeing except as checking out Bob Hope’s films in the 1960s and in the change of styles, greater permissiveness, and the youth culture.
