Reception
The film was not a great commercial success and is often cited to mark the beginning of Bob Hope's career decline. It may have been harmed by not being filmed on location in Africa (despite the producers' original plans to shoot in Kenya) at a time when audiences' tastes had become more sophisticated than in the 1940s when a faux jungle on a lot in Los Angeles was the norm. Not only were contemporary films like Hatari! shot on location, but African independence and civil wars greatly increased Americans' awareness and knowledge of the continent.
Read more about this topic: Call Me Bwana
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)