Louisiana Purchase

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!

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.

Comedian Bob Hope, in his first Technicolor performance, effortlessly portrays Jim Taylor, a political lackey of the Louisiana Purchasing Company who is unaware that he is being gulled, replacing William Gaxton who starred on Broadway in this long-running satirical comedy, featuring music and lyrics by irving Berlin. Although the original work by Morrie Ryskind, with its sardonic savaging of politicians and their methods, is carefully muted in this cinematic version, there remains much to enjoy as Taylor frantically struggles to avoid taking a rap for the misdealings of a coterie of his graftsodden superiors, played effectively by such as Donald MacBride and Frank Albertson. An opera bouffe opening serves to explain to the audience that in order to avoid onerous lawsuits, Louisiana must be accepted as a mythical location, with a bevy of comely singers offering the standard "no resemblance" disclaimer for the decoy State. Victor Moore, Vera Zorina and Irene Bordoni reprise their stage roles from a work sadly seldom performed since, with the veteran director of musicals Irving Cummings doing his best to retain some of its operetta nature and still permit Hope to gambol about as the target of a Congressional investigation headed by Senator Oliver P. Loganberry (Moore). The screen play generally fails to capture the essence of its source, and therefore much of Hope's timing is wasted upon poor material, while Moore is so torpid that he appears to be more sleep deprived than anything else. Raoul Pene Du Bois formulated the beautiful costumes and designed the splendid sets, including that for a traditional dream ballet sequence showcasing prima ballerina Zorina, and plot propelling and witty lyrics by Berlin, although too often cut, enhance the overall production, particularly the delightful title piece, sung and danced to by alluring Dona Drake. The opening scenes fare best, in particular that wherein Emory Parnell, a top studio lawyer, reads the script and then dictates a singspieled letter in rhymed couplets to advise executives against replicating the original show, a very clever and funny beginning to this lavish Paramount motion picture.

I've read that this Irving Berlin musical was based on the dealings of Huey Long and his cronies. Long was the governor of my state, Louisiana, and later the state senator and he did much that was good for it but also had some crooked deals with like-minded people who got exposed after Long's assassination in the mid-'30s. So it was that this film began with a lawyer singing of dictating a letter to the studio that the only way this story depicted here can be presented is to treat it as fiction. I'll stop there and just say that I found this Bob Hope vehicle funny and entertaining with good support from Vera Zorina, Irene Bordoni, and especially Victor Moore, all reprising their roles from the Broadway version. The Irving Berlin songs retained for this production are fine as well. Oh, and I loved the sight of the state capital from my state's capital city of Baton Rouge inserted here! Nothing more to say except I highly recommend Louisiana Purchase.

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