The Road to Hong Kong (1962)

Masterful Cinema

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

A Disappointing Continuation

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

This final Hope/Crosby "Road" picture was made a decade after their prior one, and in this one, they interact mostly with then-newer stars, with Dorothy Lamour only appearing toward the end. The movie begins with the vaudevillian song-and-dance number "Teamwork" where the stars prove they can still sing, dance, and interact like they did before.But this story is different from their past ones. It begins conventionally where they run a scam in India, but Hope has an accident and loses his memory, and Crosby ends up taking him to a lamasery to get an herb to cure his partners amnesia. Mistaken for secret agents at an airport, they are given a rocket fuel formula which the cured Hope memorizes-and when the spies discover what happened, Hope and Crosby are taken to the headquarters of "The Third Echelon", and end up being placed into a spaceship and sent into outer space. Quite the road trip.The song-and-dance numbers are fewer but still good, but as indicated above, the story is crazier than their previous ones, including the ending. Still reasonably entertaining otherwise.

Road to Hong Kong (1962): Dir: Norman Panama / Cast: Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Joan Collins, Robert Morley, Peter Sellers: Final Road To comedy flawed in that it mainly takes place in space, not Hong Kong. Bing Crosby and Bob Hope play con men who end up in space. Hope loses his memory but gains it back with enhancement. He accidentally memorizes and destroys a Russian formula for improved rocket fuel. Typical setup but detailed with plot twists sending the comic duo about an array of circumstances. Director Norman Panama has timing and chemistry with Crosby and Hope. Crosby is the straight man who easily manipulates Hope into schemes such as this. Hope is hilarious as the bubbling sidekick whose timing is on target both physically and verbally. Joan Collins is sent by Russian enemies to retrieve the formula thus positioned as the seductive vixen. Robert Morley plays the villain whose scheme isn't exactly unique but his maddening delivery is perfect. Peter sellers makes a memorable and equally amusing appearance as an Indian Physician who would be the last person to hit the top of his job requirement. Production is fine as the duo is sent through several odd procedures before being shipped off to space. Perhaps it should have been more accurately called Road to Outer Space. It is a satire of spy films that is not broad entertainment but certainly a road worth traveling. Score: 6 / 10

An amiable excursion! Admittedly, Bing has lost a bit of the old bounce, but Hope is as enthusiastically ingenuous as ever. The team's old Road companion, Dorothy Lamour, has an ten-minute scene at the climax and proves that she can still hold an audience even though she hasn't been on the big screen since the 1952 Road to Bali. This time, however, the main femme role is taken by Joan Collins who certainly looks very alluring. On the other hand, her ultra-cultured voice tends to get a bit monotonous. It's also unfortunate that the screenplay has her spending the last twenty minutes of the movie in an unattractive Chinese coolie outfit. As we might expect, the screenplay employs some good gags and amusing situations – though some of the scenes could stand a bit of trimming, particularly a long encounter between Hope and Dave King (who plays a Chinese restaurant proprietor). Norman Panama's direction tends to be loose rather than tight, flaccid rather than taut. And the same remarks could be applied to the script. Sure, the plot is a ludicrous enough peg on which to hang various "in" jokes, guest star spots and the musical numbers, plus a bit of gentle ribbing. Unfortunately, at times, some actors choose to play the game perfectly straight – particularly Collins, Morley and Gotell – instead of tongue-in-cheek. Fortunately, other credits are up to par and the movie has been realized on a fair- sized budget, including even a tiny bit of location filming in Hong Kong.

As swan songs go this could have used a decent cygneture tune. The best bit is right at the beginning when, continuing the tradition, Bing and Bob are seen as vaudevillians singing, dancing and pattering their way through 'Teamwork', with a lyric from Sammy Cahn, who had replaced Johnny Burke as Jimmy Van Heusen's permanent partner roughly a decade earlier. Plots were never a strong point in the franchise and this is, if anything, worse than most and for some unknown reason Peter Sellars is given several minutes in which to be wincingly embarrassing and utter some of the worst lines in the script. They also jettisoned Lamour as sex object but wisely allowed her a cameo appearance plus a ballad; her replacement, Joan Collins, failed to register and the best one can say about this product of the famous Rank 'Charm' School is that she clearly flunked charm. Following the opening vaudeville routine the plot continues in the way of the rest of the franchise with Bing conning Bob - here given Jimmy Van Heusen's real name, Chester Babcock, as an 'inside' joke - into the usual life-threatening stunts and for good measure we even get a laundry list of previous near-misses including the squid, human cannonball, etc but then it runs out of steam and quickly spirals into complete preposterousness. The banter is still intact albeit a little frayed around the edges but they could have signed off with something a little better than this.