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“I’Ve Given Up Kissing Strange Women”

By Raymond Benson

Bob Hope had a stellar career that stretched from the late 1930s through the 1960s, with subsequent star power appearances in his senior years on television in variety and awards shows. His efforts to entertain troops overseas for decades are highly commendable. What many punters today don’t realize, unless one is a Hope aficionado, is that his early solo comedies (or the duos with Bing Crosby) are absolute comic gems. Woody Allen has gone on the record to say that he based much of his early 1970s screen persona on Bob Hope, and one can easily see that nebbish, albeit here decidedly non-Jewish, “character” in My Favorite Blonde.

The story of this 1942 outing is credited to longtime Hope collaborators Melvin Frank and Norman Panama (the screenplay is by Don Hartman and Frank Butler...

The Road to Singapore, Zanzibar,

Morocco and Utopia

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1940, 41, 42, 43, 46 / 1:33:1 / 85, 91, 82, 90 Min. / Street Date – March 26, 2019

Starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour

Written by Frank Butler, Don Hartman, Melvin Frank

Cinematography by William C. Mellor, Ted Tetzlaff

Directed by Victor Schertzinger, David Butler, Hal Walker

Between 1940 and 1962, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby starred in seven “Road” pictures directed by such distinct talents as David Butler, Norman McLeod and Hope’s own gag-writer Norman Panama who would lead the comedian kicking and screaming into the sixties with How to Commit Marriage, a poison pen letter to the counterculture released in 1969.

Though produced during a World War, the first four Road films avoided the cynicism of that late 60’s farce – instead they were the essence of disposable fun – populist entertainments peppered with topical wisecracks, potshots at company brass and the occasional talking fish. Beginning with Road to Singapore, a...