Road to Morocco

The Road to Morocco was the most popular of the 'Road' series of movies, and is generally judged the best.

Much of that credit belongs to composer James Van Huesen. He not only gives us a nifty pastiche of music which sounds as if from the pen of Rimsky-Korsakov and Siggy Romberg, but creates two memorable numbers for the film - Bing's big number (which became a Number One hit) Moonlight Becomes You, and the title song On the Road to Morocco which contains two of the classiest lines in popular song:

"Like Webster's Dictionary, We're Morocco-bound."

For this movie, the characters' names have changed but the people stay the same. Bing Crosby is Jeff Peters and Bob is Orville 'Turkey' Jackson. They get washed up in Morocco after Turkey accidentally blows up the cargo boat they're travelling on. They're out of money and starving, so Jeff does the only sensible thing he can think of - he sells Turkey into slavery.

Turkey gets traded to a beautiful Princess, Shalmar (Dorothy Lamour, of course...) and Jeff gets pretty cut up about Turkey's luck when he finds out about it. To cut a medium-length story short, Jeff falls in love with Shalimar, and Turkey hitches onto the even more beautiful slave-girl Mihirmah (Dona Drake). Will they manage to escape the foul designs of the evil Arab ruler Mullay Kasim (Anthony Quinn)? Will they be able to set sail safely to New York? I'll leave you to find the answers.

I found myself sort of enjoying this third in the 'Road' series - sort of a guilty enjoyment given that much of it is plain stupid. But it is sort of endearing at the same time.

It is from a different age than ours, and while Bob Hope remains eternally modern, Bing's style of acting has dated very badly. But there's a few laughs here and there, and quite a bit of nostalgic enjoyment amidst the very thick corn.

This black and white transfer in original full-screen ratio is sensational... crisp and clear, with a full tonal range from black to white, with every shade of grey in-between.

There's the occasional fleck to remind us we're seeing a movie which is now more than 60 years old. But the overall quality is first class in every respect.

The mono soundtrack is clear and with a very natural presence for both dialogue and music. There is the occasional harshness present, particularly in the upper register during a Dorothy Lamour song. But this sort of period-related problem occurs only irregularly - for the most part the sound, although dated, is just fine.

The disc gives us a text-based cast and crew, with biogs of Anthony Quinn, composer James Van Huesen, Dorothy Lamour and director David Butler.

We're also given production notes, which reveal that this was credited as being American servicemen's most popular wartime movie.

The photo gallery is very slick, with ten production pics to peruse. Then the gallery moves into automatic-mode, with a slide-show set to music from the movie. It gives us a three-minute sample of lobby cards, movie stills and production shots. The pics are full screen, unlike the thumbnails we're often given.

The original trailer is built around the movie's theme-song - it's of interesting nostalgic value, but not as novel as the trailers for the preceding movies in this series.

And that's all, folks. Over in Region-1 land, DVD buyers are also given a Road to Morocco singalong feature, a 14-minute featurette in Bob Hope and the Road to Success and a clip from a Troops performance Bob Hope gave in 1945.

This is the best offering I've seen from the 'Road' movies - it's only available so far as part of this four-movie set, but I think this one would be quite enough for most people curious to see one of the movies from the most popular cinema series of all time. Before James Bond came along, that is.