Ah, gentle reader, it was but four years ago when I discovered the Bob Hope two-pack that included The Road to Bali was mislabeled at the factory and instead contained ten episodes of The Andy Griffith Show. As it and The Road to Rio fell out of copyright protection, so they’re pretty easily available in transfers of sometimes dubious quality from “nostalgia” houses which specialize in copyright-free fare. Somewhere along the line, I picked up this two DVD set. I watched The Road to Bali with my boys some time ago (back when they would watch movies with their old man–now the oldest prefers to watch Netflix alone in his room and the younger prefers an endless river of YouTube videos on a handheld device).
They’re part of the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope/Dorothy Lamour series of “The Road to….” movies which are not really a series, per se, as they play different characters in each but all have a certain type: Hope and Crosby are vaudevillians/con men/performers on the run from (usually) woman trouble who end up going to an exotic location and encountering and trying to woo the Lamour character. They’re also very self-conscious and meta-movies, where they spoof film conventions and sometimes break down the fourth wall.
The Road to Bali from 1952 finds the two performers in Australia from which they must flee to avoid a couple of shotgun weddings. They go to Darwin where they sign up as deep sea divers on an expedition looking for lost treasure. Their employer is a prince whose sister, the princess (Lamour), the boys try to woo. They find treasure and try to escape and then end up shipwrecked on another island where the natives take them in, and instead of having to choose, the princess learns she can marry multiple husbands–so she wants to marry them both. But she ends up married to the chief, and Hope and Crosby end up married to each other. A volcanic eruption seems to indicate displeasure with this turn of events, and as often happens, Crosby ends up with Lamour. This film is the only one of the series in technicolor–and represents the penultimate entry in the series, which is a weird place to start, but they’re all stand alone films.
The Road to Rio finds the boys down on their luck when they sign up at a circus. After doing their vaudeville number, Crosby tells Hope he also has to perform a high wire act–which goes awry and burns down the circus. On the run from the circus owner, the boys stow away on a ship bound for Rio. There, they encounter an heiress (Lamour) scheduled to marry her “aunt”/caretaker’s cousin unseen. The caretaker is controlling the heiress and facilitating the marriage using hypnosis. They expose Hope and Crosby as stowaways, hijinks ensue, and when they reach Rio, the boys have to break the caretaker’s hold on the girl and get the “Papers,” a MacGuffin they later expose as nothing but a MacGuffin (remember the meta nature of the films).
I suppose if you’re of a certain age and probably a bit of an old soul even then to really appreciate the films, but then again, I am both, so I’d be happy to discover more in this series out in the wild, but given how 1995 or 1996 is the Year Zero of modern culture, I won’t hold my breath.
We have that same set. My kids liked them, but they’re homeschoolers. I’ve tried to find other Road To… movies streaming, but I haven’t found them on a free service or one I already pay for yet
Yeah, as you have probably noted over the years, I prefer to gather films on physical media because relying on streaming seems almost random, at least when it comes to my taste in films.