Il re della Louisiana

I think if more movie viewers knew the story behind Louisiana Purchase the film might be better appreciated on some levels and downgraded on others.

Five years before Louisiana Purchase made it to Broadway, Huey P. Long was shot and killed in the State Capitol building in Baton Rouge. What Senator Long's intentions were for the future as far as national office was concerned is speculative fodder for historians. But he did leave behind a political machine that was the closest thing to a dictatorship we had in America's 20th Century.

Long gathered around him a gang of crooks that had few rivals among other political machines in skullduggery. Long was also smart in making very sure that very few of them were likely to be rivals. In fact some years earlier, Huey had some real problems with a Lieutenant Governor who started showing signs of independence. But that's another story.

When he died the sins of his henchmen couldn't be covered up for any length of time. Even while he was alive, FDR's Justice Department was digging into Louisiana for scandal. After Huey Long died it all came out. During the late thirties the newspapers were filled with stories of indictments and convictions coming out of Louisiana from the Governor on down. The title of the film comes from the popular name for the Long machine scandals, which were dubbed the Second Louisiana Purchase, like Watergate became the term for all the corruption stemming from the Nixon administration.

Maybe one day someone might do a serious expose of those scandals and they might make a great film. But this Louisiana Purchase isn't it.

Maybe because it was done too gently on Broadway to be real satire. The plot here and on Broadway is that the gang (who in real life would have had trouble tying their shoelaces without the Kingfish's brain behind them) frame a schnook of a State Representative as the fall guy for all the corruption. On Broadway it was William Gaxton, for the movies it was Bob Hope.

As written it's a typical Bob Hope role with a lot of topical humor that might be lost on today's audience. Irving Berlin did the songs for Louisiana Purchase. The show marked his return to Broadway, he was last there in 1933 for As Thousands Cheer. And it was his first book musical since The Cocoanuts. Berlin as a rule favored revue type shows. After Louisiana Purchase, Berlin did no other kind of show on Broadway or on film.

The other leads from Broadway, Victor Moore, Vera Zorina, and Irene Bordoni repeated their roles for the film and all did very well by them.

If this had been done as a serious drama, Hope's character would have been looking to cut a deal and turn state's witness on the others. He certainly wouldn't have gotten out of his troubles in quite the way he does in Louisiana Purchase.

Still fans of Bob Hope will appreciate the film and if people learn about the corruption in Louisiana in that period it might stimulate the more historically minded among viewers.

Although many of the same people who made this mess of a 1941 film were also involved in the original hit 1940 Broadway production, something definitely went wrong in the transition to film, and that something is Bob Hope who was not in the original show. Instead of letting this mild satire on contemporary politics in the style of "Of Thee I Sing" play as it must have in New York, Hope and his army of gag writers apparently shoved in a ton of meaningless machine gun gags, including a few on such wartime topics as immigration. The Norwegian ballerina Vera Zorina, wife of George Ballanchine at the time, was then a big star on Broadway, but pretty as she was, the camera did not love her. The only saving grace of this embarrassingly misguided musical is the superb clowning of the great Victor Moore as the befuddled senator. He, too, was a great star of the theater, but unlike the others in this film he somehow knew how to underplay his comedy for the camera. A few of the many songs Irving Berlin wrote for Broadway were retained for the film, most delightfully the catchy tune, "You're Lovely and I'm Lonely," which Zorina and Moore do hilariously as they might have done it on Broadway, in this case without the overbearing scene-stealing presence of Hope. Hope was a great screen personality and made many fine films, but this is not one of them.

This one's a real oddity: a semi-musical satire of a period of corruption that will mean nothing to anybody who is either not a resident of the United States or under eighty-ish years of age. Bob Hope stars as a naive hero who finds himself set up to take the rap when a corrupt cadre find themselves on the brink of discovery and hatches one of those ridiculous Hollywood musical plots to get himself out of trouble. Somehow, I don't think this is too closely based on factual events.

The film opens with a quirky number in which a colourful group of girls sing about how the characters are fictitious and not based on any persons living or dead, and include lyrics stating they are singing this to save the producers from being sued. Bizarre. When Hope is on screen the film is a typical Hope vehicle - which isn't necessarily a good thing - and when he's not the pace slows to a crawl. Despite this it is Victor Moore as the ageing virginal investigator on the trail of the corrupt politicos who steals the movie. Vera Zorina as Hope's love interest is an actress of extremely limited talent and best forgotten to save her descendant's embarrassment. The storyline is littered with references to contemporary matters that mean nothing today, meaning most of them flew way over the top of my head, making it somewhat flawed as a political satire - and fairly insipid as a musical

Recently, I was reading one of Internet columnist Jeffrey Well's articles and he wondered what the appeal of Bing Crosby was and that he doesn't translate beyond his era. One can say the same of his partner in crime from that era, Bob Hope. Truly, what was the appeal of this fella? Most of his pictures are terrible, including the Road Movies. The ones I can stomach are the Paleface pictures. All Bob Hope ever did was deliver puns and innuendos laced as wisecracks rather than real comedy - punchlines with no punch. He was a spoofish of current pop culture which he uses so frequently that a lot of the wisecracks fly over your head once you are out of the era, no let's the year, not even that three months ago pop culture events. This movie is one of his further nonsense. As the trailer spieled, this an adaptation of a Broadway smash that has been running for two years but as soon as you see the movie, you know it has been warped beyond belief for the screen because nothing this flimsy could have run on broadway for two years lest two weeks. And you just can feel there is a lot of political humor that has been cut out, the Victor Moore character keeps referencing democrats and republicans in oblique terms that do not advance the movie and thus are not funny because the terra firma has been eviscerated. The plot - Hope is a state rep in the house who is set up as the fall man for a bunch of corrupt school board officers. Moore is the good to his bones senator sent to investigate the irregularities. Somebody'd going to jail and it ain't going to be Hope so he tries to blackmail the senator by photographing him in an uncompromising situation, to say. The girl for the task the Hungarian immigrant played by Zorina. That's that. There is a Mardi Gras scene that is an embarassment to all involved in the production, us as an audience and others who have not seen this movie. Musical numbers are lovely but numb. Why does this movie have musical numbers? No reason except a Hope picture must have some and Hope is in none of them. By the time he is doing a filibuster a la Jimmy Stewart in Mr Smith goes to Washington, you the viewer will be ready to kill him. What a shame!

This starts off with quite a fun little ditty that serves as their libel/defamation disclaimer - proclaiming that none of this is based on any real people! Who might have taken offence in the US of A in 1941 to the idea of a senate investigation into the dodgy goings on in any state at all, let alone Louisiana? Well it appears that the imminent arrival of the tee-total "Sen. Loganberry" (Victor Moore) has set the cat amongst the pigeons, and talking of pigeons it looks like "Taylor" (Bob Hope) is going to become exactly that. The great and the good of his state have been merrily creaming off the top for years, but any evidence of their miscreant behaviour will stop firmly with this poor patsy. Facing a million years in jail, the bosses encourage him to find a way to leverage their inscrutable visitor and so he'd better get his thinking cap on. What now ensues sees Hope (well two of him quite often) and his friend "Marina" (Vera Zorina) try to embroil the man in all sorts of compromising scenarios. Of course, as things mosey on along there are a few romantic opportunities with Irène Bordoni making up this quartet of mischief and mayhem. It's based on the stage play with a few Irving Berlin numbers - notably "You're Lonely and I'm Lonely? - amongst it, and though it does drag a little as the joke borders the slapstick too closely for my liking, it does show Hope in a slightly less hapless light, Moore delivers engagingly and there's been a little thought gone into the plot to keep it from farce. It's a colourful and lively production and might well do wonders for the sale of oysters in Nebraska.