review for Here Come the Girls on AllMovie

Bob Hope tries mighty hard to give a lift to Here Come the Girls, but no comic can save a comedy that simply doesn't have gags. Oh sure, writers Edmund L. Hartmann and Hal Kanter have sprinkled a few winning jokes and situations throughout Girls, but they've also loaded it down with strings of words that may aspire to be jokes but fall far short and set-ups that try to springboard into comedy but just keep missing. Hope's fine; it's not his best performance by far, but he's doing everything he's supposed to in order to make the poor material work. It doesn't help matters that this musical is saddled with a Jay Livingston-Ray Evans score which is at best middling and more often strictly ho-hum. Even the goldplated vocal chords of Rosemary Clooney can't disguise the fact that these songs simply are not very good. Again, don't blame Clooney; she's aces. And don't blame that fine character actor Fred Clark, or the perfectly acceptable Tony Martin, or the lovely to look at Arlene Dahl. Director Claude Binyon does pump some energy into the proceedings when possible, notably in the climactic chase, and Hope fans will certainly find things to like. It just needed to be a lot funnier -- period.