Road to Singapore (1940)

Depending on what you want from Hope and Crosby, this may or may not be the best of the Road pictures. It was the first, but not the funniest. In fact, there are several rather dramatic scenes in the film (gasp!). But this film was not meant to be as zany as the subsequent Road pictures. It's right on the mark...a darned good movie! Here, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope are not confidence men, but rather are lazy drifters. Crosby is a rich boy, while Hope is not. Crosby's father -- shipping magnate Charles Coburn, wants Crosby to settle down and get married, but Crosby wants no part of it...or the upper crust visitors to his father's boat. There's a funny segment with "Captain Custard", which hints at just how wonderful the Hope and Crosby team will be. The boys flee to Singapore, where they meet -- who else -- Dorothy Lamour. Now, why exactly the exotic Lamour is working with an abusive Latin dance-partner in Southeast Asia, is anyone's guess, but Hope and Crosby save her from that dance partner -- a young Anthony Quinn. Hope, Crosby and Lamour begin living together...and falling in love. So who will Lamour marry? Hope? Of course not. Meanwhile Hope is deported...well, not quite...and ultimately the trio is reunited.The songs here are not Crosby's best. The cinematography is quite good. The laughs are many, though this is not as zany as future episodes of the story will be.Hope and Crosby are wonderful. Lamour is...well. Lamour. Anthony Quinn isn't seen too much throughout the film...but what a handsome guy back then! Charles Coburn is just right as the father.Oh, and why is Lamour singing about weeping willow trees in Southeast Asia?????This is a very good comedy, and a must for the DVD shelves of Hope or Crosby fans.

Victor Schlesinger, who also helmed the second movie in the franchise, Zanzibar, may well have directed all the Road films had he not died tragically young (51) after helming The Fleet's In. Had he done so the franchise may have had more variable scores inasmuch as Schertzinger was one of a handful of film directors (another was Edmund Goulding) who also composed notable songs for their films - and Schertzinger went out in style given that the songs he wrote, with lyricist Johnny Mercer, for The Fleet's In, were some of the finest in the history of the movie musical. In 1939 no one was thinking franchise, in fact no one was thinking beyond a one-off entry pairing Hope and Crosby - who often cross-talked their way to their respective Sound Stages on the Paramount lot, and throwing Dorothy Lamour into the mix as love interest. The one-off aspect accounts for the fact that for the only time in the franchise Bing is given a solid background - in all the others both the boys are just THERE, usually performers of some kind doubling as flimmers but with no history whatsoever - as the Fifth in a dynastic line of ship owners but even then he has already teamed up with Hope from frame 1 and significantly Hope has no background. Schertzinger supplied the music for two of the five numbers - with series lyricist Johnny Burke - the duet Captain Custard and Lamour's solo The Moon And The Willow Tree but the standout ballad proved to be Too Romantic with music by James V. Monaco, then just coming to the end of a partnership with Burke. Anthony Quinn and Jerry Colonna, who would both feature in later 'roads' (Morocco and Rio respectively) were on hand and the banter between Hope and Crosby was in place but the 'realistic' aspect - Crosby is the despair of his family by preferring work to play, not a million miles away from William Holden's David Larrabee in Billy Wilder's Sabrina Fair, also a Paramount release - tends to impair the free-flowing zanyness of the rest of the franchise. Overall a modest entertainment that paved the way for several superior entries.

The first of the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby "Road" series, and not the best.What's wrong with it? People have complained that it is plot heavy but that's a little hard to swallow because the plot could be used to stuff a portobello mushroom.The problem, I think, is that it's too serious, if you can believe it. When one of the guys loses Dorothy Lamour he acts as if he's really hurt, which destroys the ethos of the film. Too many songs, although none of them is worse than any of the ones that were to follow.No ipsative gags. How could there be? There can't be any reference to earlier movies like this because there were no earlier movies like this. Bob Hope acts as if he is trying to follow the plot, instead of improvising and winging it. He hasn't become quite the cowardly miles gloriosus of the later films. Crosby is saddled with a past from which he's trying to escape. And the gags -- though lingered over -- just aren't there.Yet it's not a bad movie. Two guys go to Southeast Asia and meet a girl. Everybody's good humored. It's diverting.You won't be depressed after you see it.

Can you imagine The Road to Singapore with parts of Bing and Bob being played by Fred MacMurray and Jack Oakie? That was the original casting that Paramount originally had for this first of the Road pictures.You can tell that they did not have a series in mind because the billing was Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour, and then Bob Hope. When MacMurray and then Oakie became unavailable, someone had the bright idea of putting Crosby and Hope together. By this time a certain rivalry had developed on radio. Both had been guests on each other's shows, forever trying to top each other with unscheduled ad-libs in the script. So the casting changes were made.There's none of the surreal humor in this that characterized the later Road pictures because the formula wasn't there yet. But when you see Crosby and Hope trying to land a fish and later on singing the Captain Custard song, the chemistry is unmistakable.The rest of the score by Jimmy Monaco and Johnny Burke consists of one of Crosby's nicest ballads, Too Romantic and a novelty song for all three of the leads, Sweet Potato Piper. The director Victor Schertzinger who was also a composer of note and Johnny Burke did a South Sea Island ballad for Dottie, The Moon and the Willow Tree.So what would have been a routine film turned out to be a shakedown cruise for a lot of movie fun.