Road to Utopia

I've got a Bob Hope box set that has a portion devoted to the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby collaborations. It includes four of the "Road" movies. It's been over three years since I blogged about the third of them, so I think now would be a good time to put the DVD into the player and watch the fourth, Road to Utopia. (The box set has two earlier collaborations between Hope and Crosby, but sadly not the final three "Road" movies.)

The movie starts off in the present, but worse than that, with Robert Benchley giving us an intro that's really not relevant to the movie. Benchley also stops the action a couple of times to make an allegedly trenchant comment about the upcoming scene, but his presence is a minus in the movie since he's not playing an actual character. Back to the present and the action of the film, Chester (Bob Hope) is an old man married to Sal (Dorothy Lamour), when their old friend Duke (Bing Crosby) shows up. This causes the three of them to think back over forty years, to when there was a gold rush in the Klondike and all three of them were there for it.

Not that this was part of the plan. Chester and Duke are partners in a double act that's part vaudeville, part carnival barker dishonesty that's gotten them stopped by the police in pretty much every town they've been in, leading them to make it all the way to the Pacific. They have to make another quick escape, but this time Chester's decided he's had enough. He wants to go back to New York while Duke wants to go to Alaska. Duke takes all of Chester's money, so Chester gets on the same boat as Duke to try to get some of the money back.

Instead, the two lose all the money, so they have to work their way to Alaska which is how they come across a map when they're cleaning the cabin of two thugs, McGurk (Nester Paiva) and Sperry (Robert Barrat). 80 years on and that sort of treasure map is a nonsense plot device, but for some reason, people really bought into it in the old days. Chester and Duke, having stolen it, think this is going to make them rich, but understandably McGurk and Sperry want it back.

And they're not the only ones who want it. Larson (Douglas Dumbrille) is the sort of person making money not from striking gold, but from serving the people trying to strike gold. But he wants in on the gold too. Sal shows up at Larson's saloon, claiming to have information about that map. But she -- and nobody else in town -- know what Sperry and McGurk look like. So as you can guess, when Chester and Duke show up, they're going to get mistaken for the two baddies. The actual Sperry and McGurk are not far behind.

Now, since we know from the film's opening that Sal and Chester are married, we know that everybody escapes, and that Sal and Chester fall in love, which complicates things back in the Klondike. Sal's job, mind you, is to get the map for Larson, but once she falls in love with Chester, she's not so sure about it. In and around all of this there's the opportunity for the leads to sing several songs.

Apparently, Road to Utopia was well received when it was released back in 1946. Perhaps that's because the movie had been held for several years so it had been quite a while since the public had seen a "Road" movie. Indeed, in the intervening years, Robert Benchley had died, that's how long it was held up. I personally found Road to Utopia a fairly weak movie, with the jokes falling flatter. Benchley adds nothing, and the infighting between the Hope and Crosby characters is wearing thin.

Technically it's a cyclone

We're in the middle of hurricane season here in the western hempisphere part of the Atlantic, and with that in mind I watched the copy of the 1937 movie The Hurricane that I've had on my DVR for several months, not to be confused with other movies with the same title.

The movie starts off with an establishing sequence of a boat sailing through the South Seas, with a Dr. Kersaint (Thomas Mitchell) among the passengers. The boat passes a deserted island, and Dr. Kersaint starts talking about the island to a female passenger. Kersaint had spent time in these islands, and he has bittersweet memories of them. As you might guess, this leads to a flashback....

The island in question, Manakoora, is part of an archipelago administered by France, who have sent a governor in the form of Eugene De Laage (Raymond Massey). This being the era before airplanes, and most of the islands not having suitable space for runways anyway, the islands are served by sailing ships that go from one island to another. Many of the ships use native Polynesins for the crews, since they have local knowledge of the seas and are accomplished seafarers, having gotten to all of these islands after all.

Among the sailors is Terangi (John Hall). The current voyage brings him back to the main island, where his fiancée Marama (Dorothy Lamour) is waiting for him. Also waiting with romantic interest for a passenger is the Governor, whose wife Germaine (Mary Astor) is on the boat. Also getting off the boat, at least with the movie making a point of showing him so we'll know it's an important cast member, is a new Catholic priest to serve the island, Fr. Paul (C. Aubrey Smith). Now that Terangi is returned to his home island, he can marry Marama and they can live happily ever after.

Well, not quite, since all of this has happened in the first 20 minutes or so. Terangi and Merama are in love, and Merama doesn't want Terangi to leave her. But his job is to go sailing, and he has to leave her, as there's no space for the wives of the sailors. This disappoints Marama, since the next voyage is taking the boat to Tahiti, the big island in the area.

But things go wrong on Tahiti, as a nasty European starts treating the Polynesian sailors like crap, even smacking Terangi. Terangi hits back in self-defense, but he breaks the other guy's jaw and this other guy has connections, which gets Terangi sent to prison for six months. Terangi is like Jean Valjean, having been oversentenced for a minor crime and wanting to escape. He keeps trying, again and again, to escape, which lengthens the sentence. But eventually he does escape, almost in time for the titular hurricane....

If there's a problem with The Hurricane, it's that it goes on too long between the time Terangi gets sentenced and the time the storm comes, with there not really being enough plot development in between. Audiences of 1937 would have wanted to see the storm, however, and that's something that's definitely worth waiting for, as the special effects are quite good for 1937. It's just a shame that the effects aren't in service of a better story.

Fan service from Hope and Crosby

I mentioned some time back getting a box set of Bob Hope movies that's really a repackaging of two Hope sets. One of those sets is several of the Road movies. Recently, I put the third of those movies in the DVD player, Road to Morocco.

The movie stars off with a bunch of radio commentators talking about a ship that blew up in the middle of the ocean. Two of the surviving passengers were Jeff Peters (Bing Crosby) and Orville Jackson (Bob Hope), who are now floating on some of the wreckage from the ship. Amazingly, they aren't carried farther out to sea, but instead wind up drifting ashore, to a part of northern Africa where the desert literally meets the sea. That allows for a camel to show up on the beach, which the two men can then ride to get to civilization and safety.

Except, of course, that there wouldn't be much of a movie in that case, so when they get to the first big town, one of those stereotypical Arab towns with a bazaar, a local strongman with a lot of women, and all that fun stuff. This is, after all, a comedy. The two men try to get some food but don't have any money, so Jeff surreptitiously sells Orville into slavery to get the money for the meal. And these two are friends?

At least Orville is going to have the chance to turn the tables on Jeff. Orville has wound up in the palace with Princess Shalamar (Dorothy Lamour) and her ladies-in-waiting. Shalamar is supposed to marry the local sheik, Mullay Kasim (Anthony Quinn), but she falls in love to marry Orville. It's a ruse, however, as Shalamar has heard a prophecy that her first husband is going to die a violent death shortly after the marriage, while it's the second husband who will have a long and happy life. Thus, marry a schlub like Orville and, after he dies, make Kasim the second husband. Meanwhile, truly falling in love with Orville is the lady-in-waiting Mihirmah (Dona Drake).

Orville learns about the prophecy, which is why he offers to let Jeff marry Shalamar. Orville figures that in this case, it will be Jeff who dies the violent death, leaving Orville free to marry Shalamar and become that happy second husband. In any case, the two mean still have to deal with the wrath of Kasim....

That's the basic plot of Road to Morocco, but by this point, even though it was only the third movie in the series, the movies are really more about the banter between Hope and Crosby, and breaking the fourth wall, than they are about the actual goings-on. As such, the movies may not appeal to people looking for something with a more coherent plot. There's also the chance for Crosby to croon several songs, while Lamour also gets to sing a song.

I'm not all the way in the "wants a coherent plot" camp, but I'm also definitely not firmly in the "inside baseball" camp. As a result, I can see that there are going to be people who like Road to Morocco more than I did. It's certainly not a bad movie; you just have to know what you're getting into and be lookin for that.

Caught in the Draft

Another box set I pulled out of storage is my Bob Hope set, which is really a repackaging of two sets, one of just him and one with six of the "Road" movies. Anyhow, I put one of the DVDs in and watched a new to me movie, Caught in the Draft.

Bob Hope plays Don Bolton, a Hollywood actor who has a fear of loud noises. This causes a problem because the film he's currently working on is a war picture; as you can guess there's all sorts of shooting of blanks where they can't just put the sound effects in in post-production. Meanwhile, visiting the set is Col. Fairbanks (Clarence Kolb) and his lovely daughter Antoinette (Dorothy Lamour). Bolton draws the erroneous conclusion that Fairbanks is just another extra. This starts him off on the wrong foot with the colonel, which is a problem because at the same time he experiences love at first sight with Antoinette.

Don plans to use any means he can to see Antoinette again, although she realizes what a phony he can be even if she does develop some feelings for him. There's a bigger problem on the horizon for Don, however. One morning at breakfast, he, his assistant Bert (Eddie Bracken), and his agent Steve (Lynne Overman) read in the paper that Congress is busy passing a law setting up a draft registry. (The movie was released about five months before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, sending the US into World War II and obviating this sort of plot device.) Needless to say, he's worried that he's going to be drafted immediately, although that ought to be a load of nonsense as it would take time for the bill to be signed by the President and then registration to be set up. Never mind the reasonable probablility that he wouldn't be drafted at all.

In any case, Don wants to find a way to get out of the draft, and realizes that one of the ways would be to get a deferment for marriage. He's chased a lot of women in his life, although for one reason or another, none of them is suitable for this. Except for maybe Antoinette. She might be open to the idea of marrying Don, but not as a means of Don getting out of the draft. With that in mind, Don has a nutty idea of setting up a phony enlistment sergeant who will declare Don unfit to serve because of that fear of loud noises. Antoinette has already seen through this ruse, too, and beats Don to the punch.

So Don has enlisted, and for some odd reason both Bert (who at least would certainly have been draft-eligible) and Steve both enlist too. None of them have any idea of what being in the army really entails. Don, at least, comes around to the idea that he'll have to be a good soldier in order to win the colonel's permission to let him marry Antoinette. The bad news is that everything he tries backfires in his face and goes spectacularly wrong. But this being a light romantic comedy, it's fairly obvious that Hope and Lamour are going to end up together in the end.

Caught in the Draft is a fairly formulaic movie in the sense that you can pretty much expect a lot of what transpires in the movie. I mean, there are only so many situations you can get into in basic training, and only so many ways in which things can go wrong. Also, Bob Hope was building his "coward" persona, so there's a limit on how that can be developed in the context of a service comedy. Indeed, while watching this I couldn't help but think that somebody like Jerry Lewis could be plugged into the movie and you could have done just as well. (Indeed, Martin and Lewis did At War With the Army a decade after Caught in the Draft.)

None of this means that the movie is bad. It's a perfectly adequate programmer, doing more or less what it sets out to do in being reasonably entertaining, certainly for audiences of the day, although people who aren't so into old movies will probably find it old-fashioned. Hope is adept at comedy and comes off well here; Lamour is lovely to look at as the female lead in a role that presents no challenges. Caught in the Draft is the sort of movie that's perfect for a box set if not the sort of movie you'd want to pay standalone prices for.

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.

The broadcast of size

About a year ago, I mentioned picking up a cheap Bob Hope box set with a whole bunch of movies I hadn't blogged about before. Recently, I got it back out and put the DVD containing The Big Broadcast of 1938 in the DVD player since I hadn't mentioned a Bob Hope movie in several months.

This was Hope's first feature film, although he had made half a dozen shorts, so he's technically not the star here, although he shows up right at the beginning of the movie. He's Buzz Fielding, a radio announcer who is supposed to be on the S.S. Gigantic, which is going on a transatlantic boat race with the S.S. Colossal, the former having a new radio-powered propeller. But Buzz is currently in jail, because he's got three ex-wives: Cleo (Shirley Ross), Grace (Grace Bradley), and Joan (Dorothy Howe), who are all looking for their alimony. He's also got a fiancée in Dorothy Wyndham (Dorothy Lamour), who bails him out by hocking the engagement ring. Of course, that ring isn't paid for. And Buzz has a $50,000 bet on the Gigantic winning the race.

As for the nominal star of the movie, that's W.C. Fields, playing two characters. T. Frothinghill Bellows owns the Gigantic, and has a brother S.B., also played by Fields. Frothinghill wants his brother to be on the Colossal, as S.B. has a reputation for extremely bad luck, and putting him on the competing ship means it a certainty Bellows' ship will win the race. However, after a golfing scene that has nothing to do with the plot, such as it is, S.B. flies off and lands on the Gigantic.

Buzz and his ex-wives all wind up on the ship, as does Dorothy, along with S.B.'s daughter Martha (Martha Raye, who already has her big mouth in the opening credits). Bob Hayes (Leif Erickson) is the engineer behind the radio propeller, which he may or may not be able to use for various reasons.

But the real point of the movie is for a series of variety numbers. First up is bandleader Shep Fields, whose shtick was "rippling rhythm", whatever that was; he conducts a song with an animated backdrop of an anthropomorphic drop of water. There's a male Mexican singer, and a female opera singer who does Wagner. Some of the stars also get to sing, most notably Hope and Ross doing "Thanks for the Memories", which of course would become Hope's signature song. Fields gets to do a couple more routines.

The Big Broadcast of 1938 was the third (I think) movie Paramount released in the Big Broadcast series, and wasn't really meant to be watched for the plot, more for the musical interludes and comic sequences, making me think of Hollywood Party. I have to admit that I wasn't a huge fan of the variety numbers, and Fields was relatively irritating here. Why, for example, would he stop to play golf (and be obnoxious to everybody around him) instead of getting on the ship? Surely his brother would have made certain he got on the right ship. The movie also ends rather abruptly, as if the writers didn't know how to come up with a real resolution.

Some people may like the variety numbers, as well as Fields' comedy, more than I do. Those people will probably like The Big Broadcast of 1938. For the rest of us, it's more of a time capsule of what audiences might have wanted back in 1938.