Road to Zanzibar

I've mentioned a fairly big box set of Bob Hope films that I picked up some time back. I think it's actually two box sets repackaged as one, with a bigger set of just Bob Hope, and a smaller set of Hope with Bing Crosby. The Hope/Crosby set has some but not all of the "Road" pictures, and recently I watched the second of those, Road to Zanzibar.

Hope and Crosby are still a team after getting off the Road to Singapore, starting off here as a carnival attraction in which Crosby is Chuck Reardon the barker, while Hope is Fearless Frazier, the human cannonball. But Fearless isn't just a cannonball; on top of that his outfit is supposed to be doused in kerosene such that when he's shot through a ring of fire, he'll (or at least his outfit) catch fire before landing in some body of water.

However, that's not really the way the act works. In fact, the cannon has a secret compartment in the base, and "Fearless" hides there while a kerosene-soaked dummy goes through the ring of fire. It's really much safer that way, after all. This time, however, there's a glitch. The dummy doesn't land in water, but instead crashes into the circus big top which, being fabric, catches fire, burning to the ground and sending everybody running to escape. Fortunately, nobody's found dead, not even Fearless.

That of course is because Fearless was still in the cannon. But it also means that the ruse is going to be figured out sooner or later, so Chuck an Fearless need to start up a new act somewhere else. That's how they wind up on the island of Zanzibar, which at the time was a British possession before becoming nominally independent for a few years in the early 1960s and ultimately joining with Tanganyika to become Tanzania.

Before they can restart their carny schemes however, Chuck gets the duo into more trouble, as he buys a worthless diamond mine. Fearless sells it on to someone else, but that's going to necessitate them making another quick escape. This is how they meet Donna (Dorothy Lamour) and Julia (Una Merkel). Julia says that Donna has been capured by white slavers, and indeed, she takes the two men to a slave auction where Donna can be bought. So Chuck and Fearless buy Donna's freedom, before finding out that this was a scam and the two women were in cahoots with the supposed slave trader. Donna also supposedly has a wealthy boyfriend, and she and Julia get the two men to take them on a safari so that she can scam them by eventually meeting her rich boyfriend.

Of course, both Chuck and Fearless fall in love with Donna, complicating matters. Both of them get the opportunity to sing a number of songs along the way, before the eventual more or less happy ending.

There's not a terribly coheren't plot to Road to Zanzibar. Apparently, after the success of Road to Singapore, Paramount wanted to make a sequel for Crosby and Hope, which meant that the movie would be more about their gags and singing, ultimately feeling more like a series of sketches than a fully coherent movie. This may not appeal to some viewers, but if you like the amiable humor of Crosby and Hope, you'll probably like the movie. Audiences back in the early 1940s certainly liked the pair, making the movie a hit.

Some modern viewers will also be a bit uncomfortable with the thoroughly inaccurate look at Africa, but it should also be pointed out that part of the humor in the Road movies is that they were spoofing popular movie conventions of the day, much in the same way the Dogville shorts did at the beginning of the sound era. Hope and Crosby never made a "Road" movie about Europe, but I get the impression it would have had the same inaccurate and stereotypical view of European villages a lot of Hollywood movies from that era had.