COMMENTARY : Celebrating 90 Years of Hope in Blockbuster Style : Television: NBC tribute’s nostalgic tone rings out of tune with its honoree, a razor-sharp performer who doesn’t look or seem his age.

There are two ways to look back on a giant career such as that of Bob Hope, who will turn 90 on May 29 and is the subject of a suitably blockbuster three-hour, star-studded tribute by NBC tonight (at 8 on Channels 4, 36 and 39).

The first is simply to summarize the voluminous amount of appearances he’s made all over the world and in various media, and then inventory the tonnage of awards he’s accumulated over time, with the expectation that this makes his importance self-evident.

The second is to try to assess who he is and what he’s really meant in the cultural scheme of things, beyond roasts and toasts, honoraria and other rosy accolades that serve the occasion but not much else.

The latter is, of course, the more difficult. Few people of any age or profession have seen more of the world and so much of its horrors than Hope, who has known and outlived most of the heads of state, military leaders and sports and show biz heroes who came to power and prominence from the 1930s through the Cold War years. In fact, Hope misses being as old as the century by three years, and has accumulated enough frequent flyer miles to have earned unlimited free trips to the moon.

He began as a teen-age song-and-dance man from Cleveland in 1924, and quipped and seemingly glided his way from vaudeville to Broadway to radio to television and the movies, and then to a certain kind of emblematic Americana without, miraculously, becoming overly sentimental, pompous or self-important. Something in his sardonic voice, his wisecracking style, his sidelong take on things, his frequent preference in earlier romantic roles for not winning the girl (implying that there’ll be no “happily ever after”) suggests a peculiarly American stoicism and reserve.

Which run bone deep in him. Nobody, it seems, gets close to Hope--Milton Berle once observed, “Bob Hope has four children, two of whom he knows personally.” And in their SCTV duologues, Rick Moranis’ Woody Allen walked down the street pulling his troubles out of his chest like kapok while Dave Thomas’ Hope ambled along imperturbably beside him, cutting all of Moranis’ squiggly Angst short with a single, hard rejoinder, something like, “Well, how about that?”

For all his Establishment eminence, particularly among wealthy Republicans, Hope has always been a lone wolf with a well-honed survival instinct, answerable only to himself.

That may be what prompted one of the cruelest assessments ever made about him, when an equally famous colleague once said, “If Hope hadn’t wrapped himself in the American flag, his career would have been over years ago.”

There’s often a kernel of truth in cruelty, but in this case it’s irrelevant. Hope’s first Broadway hit was “Roberta” in 1933. His first big radio success, “The Pepsodent Show,” took place in 1938. In 1940 he won a special Oscar for “achievement in humanity” (one of four). That same year he was Motion Picture Daily’s “Champion of Champions” and Radio Daily’s “No. 1 Entertainer,” and through the ‘40s--the era of his “Road” pictures--was on the Top 10 list of moneymaking stars (he still is, with an estimated personal fortune of $150 million). His early to mid-career movie roles are still amazingly fresh. He’s been with NBC-TV since 1950.

For a while at least--particularly during the Vietnam era and for some time after--the breezy confidence he brought with him everywhere seemed to come more from his hobnobbing with rich and powerful country clubbers and politicos than from a characteristic American optimism, and he fell out of favor with the young. After Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, the nature of stand-up itself had changed. Too, the format of his variety shows had hardened into concrete, and though he still bobbed onstage as light as a cork, his references grew moldy. Something in the eyes often told us he was on automatic pilot.

But there’s no way to calculate what Hope’s wartime tours, beginning in World War II and ending with Desert Storm, meant to the soldiers who sat in homesickness and miserable uncertainty, not only about their future, but everyone else’s. Lots of people have done entertainment tours, but no one brought along a hotter lineup of starlets, celebrities, singers, musicians and other comedians. Beautiful women, the romance of the American pop song, jokes, camaraderie--for a couple of hours in rickety makeshift theaters from Sicily to Pavuvu, he brought everyone home. That’s not easily forgotten.

Some of the hosts and guests NBC has lined up for “Bob Hope: The First 90 Years” include Walter Cronkite, Angela Lansbury, George Burns, Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, Lucie Arnaz, Carol Burnett, Roseanne and Tom Arnold, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Gen. Colin Powell, Siskel & Ebert, President Clinton and former Presidents George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter. Altogether, a roster of figures who share with Hope a nose for what makes up America’s ongoing Establishment franchise.

What seems odd about this tribute (taped May 1) is that its nostalgic tone, as well-intended and well-earned as it is, is pitched in the wrong key. For Hope has not yet become an old guy waving feebly to his dutiful throng. What’s less apparent in his TV specials, but not in his live solo concerts, is that he has always been a razor-sharp performer with an enormous sense of command over an audience, a master craftsman. To us, he doesn’t feel 90, let alone look it. He still has the reflexes of a card-shark.

They’ll surely be evident amid all the heavily freighted sentiment that will come his way. Odds are, no matter what happens, he won’t tear up, or bask too obviously, or choke with sentiment. He’ll do what he’s always done with inscrutable ease: He’ll thank everybody and then tell some jokes.