The Big Broadcast of 1938 was the movie that launched Bob Hope’s film career and introduced audiences to the hit song “Thanks for the Memory.” It is not widely known that Hope’s decades-long theme, often mis-rendered in the plural as “thanks for the memories,” is a divorce song.
In the film, we first meet Hope as radio announcer Buzz Fielding, stuck in “alimony jail” where his three (!) ex-wives show up to try to get him released so that he can get to his next gig and earn the dough they want. When they learn that he has a new fiancée (Dorothy Lamour), they follow along, hoping to sabotage the relationship before there is a fourth ex-Mrs. Fielding to divide the spoils.
Hope, Lamour, and the three exes board a cutting-edge tech (it runs, like the movie, on “radio power”) ocean liner, the S. S. Gigantic, which is embarking on a transatlantic race with the S. S. Colossal. The set-up is silly, but just an excuse to string together various comedy and musical acts in the “Big Broadcast” variety show format.
We get some delightful W. C. Fields sequences, and an eclectic musical line-up that includes Kirsten Flagstad singing Wagner’s Die Walküre, with the winged-helmet-and-spear look that would reach the summit of its mainstream popularity two decades later in “What’s Opera, Doc?” with Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. (Three years after her appearance in the film, Flagstad would be criticized by many for giving up her Met career to return to her husband in Nazi-occupied Norway.)
Fortunately for all concerned, Lamour leaves Hope for the ship’s engineer, while Hope and his first ex-wife (Shirley Ross) rekindle their flame via the song that would win the Academy Award for best song.
“Thanks for the Memory” was written by a brilliant, Jewish duo, composer Ralph Rainger and lyricist Leo Robin. In its original showing it is an intricately balanced performance by Hope and Ross: a subtle, comic-tragic process in which the divorced couple, through memories of the past, come to understand their continuing vulnerability to and love for each other in the present.
One variant of the lyrics:
Thanks for the memory
Of sentimental verse
Nothing in my purse
And chuckles
When the preacher said
For better or for worse
How lovely it was
Thanks for the memory
Of Schubert's Serenade
Little things of jade
And traffic jams
And anagrams
And bills we never paid
How lovely it was
We who could laugh over big things
Were parted by only a slight thing
I wonder if we did the right thing
Oh, well, that's life, I guess
I love your dress
[…]
We said goodbye with a highball
Then I got as high as a steeple
But we were intelligent people
No tears, no fuss
Hooray for us
Strictly entre nous
Darling, how are you?
And how are all
Those little dreams
That never did come true?
Awfully glad I met you
Cheerio and toodle-oo
Thank you
Thank you so much
[A must-watch: Bob Hope and Shirley Ross sing “Thanks for the Memory” in The Big Broadcast of 1938.]
Interviewed by Max Wilk in the 1970s, Robin recalled his and Rainger’s first time playing the song for Big Broadcast director Mitchell Leisen:
We get about halfway into the second chorus, and I see that Mitch has pulled out his handkerchief and starts to wipe his eye. And I thought, “Oh, Christ! What’s this! It’s supposed to be funny, and here the guy’s going to weep!” Well, we finished the song, and Mitch said, sniffing, “No, it’s not funny, but I’ll take it.”