Road to Singapore (1940)

Some time back, after buying a box set of the movies of William Powell at Warner Bros., I did a post on an early Powell movie called The Road to Singapore. Of course, there's a much more famous movie with the title Road to Singapore, which is on the Bob Hope box set that I picked up a year or so ago. Recently, I put that DVD in the player and watched the movie.

Bing Crosby and Bob Hope play Josh Mallon and Ace Hannigan respectively. At the start of the movie they're sailors getting back to San Francisco from a voyage. Some strangers come in and approach Ace, asking him about a woman named Cherry. We never meet Cherry, but apparently something happened that caused her to think that confirmed bachelor Ace was going to marry her. So he and Josh start a diversion to escape.

Josh is a confirmed bachelor too, but he's got a bigger problem. He's actually Josh Mallon V, the son of Joshua Mallon IV (Charles Coburn). Joshua IV is the head of the Mallon shipping lines, and it seems (not stated in the movie) that he has the policy of putting his son in the grunt work to learn how the whole business works, before Joshua V takes over. Joshua is also supposed to get married to Gloria Wycott (Judith Barrett), but he has no desire to do this.

After Joshua's engagment party goes bad, he and Ace decide that the best thing to do is to escape the United States. So they hope on a boat and head across the Pacific Ocean, presumably for Singapore as the title says. But they don't make it that far, instead getting off on the island of Kaigun somewhere south of Indonesia.

There, the two meet Mima (Dorothy Lamour), who immediately moves in with them as some sort of housekeeper, in order to get away from her brutal would-be boyfriend Caesar (a young Anthony Quinn); together the two had been doing a nightclub act. Both Ace and Josh pretty quickly fall in love with Mima, although as you can guess there are going to be all sorts of complications along the way.

This is the first of the "Road" movies, and it doesn't seem as though the producers at Paramount had expected this movie to be successful and spawn the entire "Road" series as there's none of the breaking of the fourth wall here that there is in later movies. The movie still works quite well, however, as Hope and Crosby have excellent chemistry together, with Lamour being the very appealing woman for them to have a not-quite rivalry over.

If there was a flaw for me, it was the amount of musical numbers, which seemed quite high. I'm not the biggest fan of Bing Crosby's singing, but I'm sure that other people who like that sort of vocal styling won't mind the musical numbers. There was also a plot hole for me based on Ace's not having a passport. One wonders where he was sailing to be away for months but not be out of the United States.

Still, if you haven't seen any of the "Road" movies, Road to Singapore being the first isn't a bad place to start.