Call Me Bwana

Call Me Bwana (1963)

Hope was never lovelier... Ekberg was never funnier!

A returning moon capsule goes off course and lands in Africa where a little-known tribe finds it. Washington sends Matthew Merriwether to recover it—thinking he's an expert on the region—when in fact he's no such thing. However, a foreign power sends Secret Agent Luba to try and acquire the capsule for itself and, when Matthew and Luba reach their destination, they find that the tribe believes the capsule to be sacred and won't give it up.

Date of release
1963-06-14
TMDB
5.8 / 10 (10)
Runtime
1h 42m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Gordon Douglas

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Pinewood Studios

Call Me Bwana is a 1963 British Technicolor farce film starring Bob Hope and Anita Ekberg and directed by Gordon Douglas.

Production

According to Albert R. Broccoli's autobiography When the Snow Melts, Eon Productions was originally contracted by United Artists to make two films a year for them: one James Bond film and one non-Bond film. Many original suggestions were meant to showcase Sean Connery, who turned them all down, as he did not want his career totally in the hands of Eon.

When asked by journalist and close Broccoli affiliate Donald Zec if they had any ideas for their non-Bond film, Harry Saltzman, who had previously made The Iron Petticoat with Hope, suggested a Bob Hope movie. Zec replied that he had seen a British rock and roll group called The Beatles that had sellout crowds and thought about featuring them in a film.

The film was originally intended to be shot entirely on location in Kenya but the problems of the Mau Mau Uprising led the producers to only have second unit cinematography led by John Coquillon.

Edie Adams thought that she was actually going to Africa and had painful inoculations. She remembered that the film seemed to be written as it went along; initially her character was a nuclear scientist, then a big-game hunter. One day on the set, she met a stuntwoman dressed like her character, throwing a male stuntman in a jiu jitsu throw; Adams realised that now her character was a secret agent.

In fact, the film was indeed being written during shooting. In October 1962, after being in production for two weeks, producer Broccoli hired novelist Paul Jarrico to do a "fast rewrite." Six writers had already worked on the script, "hundreds of jokes had been written about a bumbling explorer and a CIA agent searching for a U.S. space capsule in Africa, but no filmable story had emerged." Jarrico believed the script needed logic.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended