Memorable, crazy movie

hyped garbage

As Good As It Gets

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

While the theatre is always experienced in the present tense, with the passing of time more and more films are viewed through the lens of hindsight; so one notices here little dissonances as early as the opening credits in which Bob Hope is billed third after Bing and Dottie. Dorothy Lamour is still noticeably young and fresh-faced, while Bob is permitted to be more of a ladies' man than he later would.It's all pretty forgettable, but one views it indulgently, knowing that the talking fish and other enjoyable breaches of the fourth wall were not far away thanks to this film.

First of the Road Series, starring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Dorothy Lamour that served as escapist fare during and after WWII to supposed exotic destinations. Although Singapore is the supposed destination for the boys, they never made it quite that far, ending up on the fictional island of Kaigoon, in eastern Indonesia, south of Flores. They sit down in a restaurant where Dorothy Lamour(Mima) and Anthony Quinn(as Caesar)are a dancing floor attraction. Dorothy is a western girl who has gone native. As part of their act, Caesar wraps a whip around Dorothy's waist. When Dorothy shows some interest in the boys with her eyes, Caesar acts jealous. The boys do their first signature pat-a-cake routine, before laying Caesar out. Caesar continues to be an occasional thorn in the side of the others. When Mima is walking outside, he grabs her and pulls her into the jungle. The boys hear her screams and , after another pat-a-cake routine, lay out Caesar in a big mud puddle. Later, Caesar realizes that Hope doesn't have a passport, hence calls immigration authorities to deport him. Hope is put in a police van, from which he escapes....Quinn would play a villain in several more of the Road Series.Of course, Bing and Hope continually fight over Mima. At a yearly community festival, the boys don't know that part of its function is to allow maidens to make their choice of husband. A lovely maiden chooses Hope to dance with, but he runs away when told the custom. Meanwhile, Bing has to chose between Mima and Gloria, his girlfriend back home, who has come to the island with his father to escort him back home.Actually, the film begins with Bing and Hope disembarking from the ship they have been working on, badmouthing wives and girlfriends, swearing they are through with women. Of course, they break this vow when they get to know Mima, although they complain that her neatness standards are higher than theirs: typical of women. Charles Colburn plays Bing's father, whom we meet in the first part and again toward the end, when he comes to take Bing home to help him run his shipping business and marry Gloria.Charles Colburn didn't start in Hollywood until about 60, yet he appeared in more than 70 films and had many TV appearances until his death, more than 20 years later. He usually played fathers and other authority figures. I remember him as the father of Mabel: Bell's girl friend, in "The Story of Alexander Graham Bell"Dorothy Lamour's early ambition was to become a band and radio singer, rather than an actress. This she accomplished. She usually got a song or 2 in the Road Series. She had also played exotic women in several of her early films, thus was ideal in a series supposedly going to various exotic locals. She sure didn't look exotic to me. Don't know why she was chosen to stand in for exotic-looking women.

ROAD TO SINGAPORE owes more to the charisma of its three stars--BING CROSBY, BOB HOPE and DOROTHY LAMOUR, for its success than it does to the silly script that has the boys meeting singer Lamour in a nightclub and taking her away from the clutches of villainous ANTHONY QUINN.The boys soon have Lamour keeping house for them and of course she falls in love with one of them--guess who? That's about it for the plot, with a few pleasant song interludes thrown in for the sake of singers Crosby and Lamour.For fans of this series, Dorothy Lamour never looked more fetching and shows a good flair for comedy while playing straight for comic Hope and casual Bing. There's nothing special here to make it one of the more memorable "Road" films--indeed, it's rather slow in getting started and takes awhile to make the proceedings look as amiable as they become, thanks to the interplay between the three stars.Better "Road" films were sure to follow, since this became one of Paramount's most popular films in 1940.

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.