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Road movies of the 1940s cite show business to represent how America cohered through the popular culture which USO acts, armed forces radio, and amateur revues exemplified for troops who, serving in Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa, were far away from home. Centered in Hollywood’s various entertainment industries (the movies, broadcasting, records, vaudeville), show business mediated the distance between being “over here” and “over there.” This premise informs the enormously successful Hope and Crosby Road to series, which in many respects defines the utopian value system of the studio-era road movie although, unlike most American road films made before or afterwards, none of the Hope and Crosby jaunts traverses the continental United States, and none follows the narrative syntax of the classic road movie form. Nevertheless, if the Road to series did not actually give a name to that discernible type of Hollywood product called “a road picture,” it surely popularized the label.

Bob Hope’s mobility as an entertainer during the 1940s exemplifies the wartime correspondence of showbiz and the road. At the same time that he was a major movie star for Paramount, he toured extensively in vaudeville, appearing on stage shows with his films, and he had his own weekly radio program on NBC. He often did his radio show on the road, first leaving the studio in Hollywood to perform in California service bases in 1941. He MC’d the Victory Caravan, and then began doing his USO tours with Frances Langford and Jerry Colonna, regulars on his radio show at that point, throughout the US in 1942, Europe in 1943, and, with dancer Patty Clark added to the cast, the Pacific in 1944. After the war he kept on broadcasting his popular weekly show from army camps even though “his radio audience was becoming tired of service jokes” (Marx: 205), critics complained that “playing Army camps had made him lazy about trying anything new” (211), and his original sponsor, Pepsodent, dropped his contract because it was too expensive to continue broadcasting outside of the studio.

In the six Road to films produced between 1940 and 1953, Hope’s partnership with Bing Crosby brings the vaudeville style of his radio show, with its homey connotations of popular American entertainment, to colonial outposts (Singapore, Zanzibar, Morocco, Rio, the Klondike in the “utopian” days of the Gold Rush, Bali) just as his USO shows did during the Second World War.2 _{Hope and Crosby, in fact, first performed together on a vaudeville stage} – New York’s Capitol theater – in 1932. Unlike other comedy teams, whenever they appeared together on radio and in army camp shows as well as in Paramount’s all-star musicals or the Road to series, Hope and Crosby establish their camaraderie before an audience through a repartee more typical of live performance than film. The self- referentiality of their patter – from affectionate to competitive to outright put-downs –

emphasizes their star personae as famous entertainers over any diegetic characterizations. Even the gags built on Crosby’s frequent guest appearances in Hope’s solo films during this period, far from testifying to their off-screen closeness (one star doing a favor for the other), remind audiences of the Road to pictures and, more importantly, acknowledge that the series motivates their traveling and teamwork alike in show business.3 _{Remembering his} European tour in a recent television special, Hope goes so far as to mention that his life as a USO performer imitated his road pictures with Crosby. After touring in Britain, Hope remarks, he then literally went on the road to Morocco, moving next to North Africa for his first USO performances in a combat zone (“Bob”).

Road to Morocco is the only one of the series to acknowledge even remotely its setting in contemporary world events. This film opens with a ship exploding at sea (a result, it turns out, of Hope lighting a cigarette near the space where ammo is stored) and then cuts to various radio news commentators – two in Asia (supposedly of Chinese and Japanese origin), one in the USSR, one in the UK – speculating on its likely cause. However, Road to Morocco soon leaves a world at war behind once Hope and Crosby travel to an exotic land whose mise-en-scène evokes the Orientalized atmospheric movie palaces of the 1920s more than anything else. As Morocco typifies, the entire series seems a throwback to the colonial narratives of Kipling and Conrad as filtered through jingoistic American eyes. (The first film, Road to Singapore, in fact, resulted from Paramount’s attempt to salvage such a script entitled “Road to Mandalay” earmarked for Fred MacMurray and Jack Oakie.) One of the series’ writers, Don Hartman, explained: “You take a piece of used chewing gum and flip it at a map. Wherever it sticks you can lay a Road picture, so long as the people there are jokers who cook and eat strangers. If they’re nasty and menacing, it’ll be a good Road picture. The key to the thing is menace offsetting the humor” (Hope: 139). With Hope and Crosby playing cocky Westerners encountering “primitive” native cultures, it appears to follow that one location can readily replace another in the series’ formula, proving that “you don’t have to know the language,” as Crosby and the Andrews Sisters sing in Road to Rio, or appreciate cultural difference. Show business, these films assume, is the universal language. When in Rio, Hope and Crosby get a job in a nightclub by claiming they have an American band; since they don’t have other musicians, they hire local talent, the three Wiere Brothers, who speak no English. So Hope and Crosby teach each one a different Yankee expression – “hep talk,” they call it – connoting the idiom of American popular culture: “You’re telling me,” “You’re in the grove, Jackson,” “This is murder.”

What establishes the Americanness of these two famous road men, then, is not the “otherness” of the foreign culture they encounter while on the road, since the films render their exotic locales and adventure plots cartoonish enough to make the condescending

stereotypes ideologically transparent, but the stars’ identification with show business, which uses the road trip to display the global hegemony of US entertainment. The Road to pictures thus repeatedly disrupt their jingoistic parodies of imperial adventure stories with show business “shtick” that draws its humor from the recognizable personae of Hope, Crosby, and their co-star Dorothy Lamour. “If she looks like Lamour, she can sing like Lamour,” Crosby explains to Hope in Rio, when featuring her character, whose resemblance to Lamour has not been previously noted, as the singer of the bogus American band. This type of extradiegetic awareness characterizes the entire series, underscoring each film’s coherence as a show in contrast to its exaggerated incoherence as a narrative. The most obvious example occurs as the signature “patty-cake” routine gets used from film to film within the series, since the gag it provokes, by failing to work in the expected way set up in the first film, Road to Singapore, is the realization that the villains have already learned about it from the movies. By the time Hope and Crosby take their road to Rio, Gale Sondergaard’s two henchmen fall for the routine precisely because they haven’t been paying close enough attention: “That’s what they get for not seeing our pictures,” Hope cracks. Indeed, at one point in Road to Rio, Crosby and Lamour watch a ballroom dance number from a film within the film, and he tells her to look closely at two of the musicians performing in the background, none other than Hope and Crosby themselves. Crosby explains: “We stopped off in Hollywood for a few days and stole a couple of dollars doing extra work.”

Road to Utopia (produced before Hope began his Pacific USO tour in 1944 but not released until 1946 because of Paramount’s backlog) even begins with a pre-title segment in which well-known humorist and sometimes-actor Robert Benchley directly addresses the audience to foreground the film’s status as an object of popular entertainment:

For those of you who don’t go to the movies, let me introduce myself. I’m Robert Benchley. (Pause.) No matter. For one reason or another the motion picture you are about to see is not very clear in many spots. As a matter of fact, it was made to demonstrate how not to make a motion picture and at the same time win an Academy Award. Now some one in what is known as the front office has thought that an occasional word from me might help to clarify the plot and other vague portions of the film. Personally, I doubt it. Shall we go?

After inviting the spectator to join in the road trip, as it were (“Shall we go?”), Bentley repeatedly interrupts the narrative, his head appearing in a corner of the screen to provide a running commentary about the fictiveness of the diegesis. He explains the use of a flashback, for instance, points out the insertion of a crowd scene in post-production, remarks that the

villains want only to see Dorothy Lamour in a sarong, and so on. Finally, as the villains chase Hope and Crosby through the snow, Benchley’s visage pops up and he remarks: “Exciting, isn’t it?” Then he ponders the situation, and his language shifts attention to the two stars’ personae once he realizes: “If Hope and Crosby are caught, they’ll be killed, they won’t be able to tell any more of those jokes. . . . Mush!” he shouts, to encourage the villains’ dog sled. Benchley’s extradiegetic narration sets the tone for the film’s continuing allusions to showbiz as its primary referential field. Road to Utopia opens in the present day, with Hope and Lamour an old-married couple; when Crosby appears on the scene, the comic faces the camera and mutters: “And I thought this was going to be an A picture.” At one point in the extended flashback to the 1910 Gold Rush narrative, as Hope and Crosby stoke the furnace of a ship, a magician walks by, prompting Crosby to ask: “Are you in this picture?” “No,” the interloper replies, “I’m taking a shortcut to Stage Ten.” When Hope and Crosby fail to win an amateur night contest aboard the ship, the former pouts (anachronistically, of course), “Next time I’ll bring Sinatra.” When he gets to kiss Lamour relatively early in the plot, Hope turns to the audience and says, “As far as I’m concerned this picture is over now.” At another point. Hope hears an orchestra playing as Lamour sings to him out of doors. As the couple walks away, he turns around and complains, “Aw, c’mon folks, quit following us, will you?” Similar recognition that the stars are acting in a film occurs when Hope curses their bad luck,

Plate 5.1 Bing Crosby and Bob Hope admire the Alaskan scenery in Road to Utopia, and

the mountain they see reminds Hope of his “bread and butter,” the Paramount logo.

and his voice is blanked out on the soundtrack. “I told you they wouldn’t let you say that,” Crosby reminds him. Right before they begin their “buddy” number (“Put It There, Pal”), Crosby announces, “Well, here we are, off on another road.” Hope pushes the self- referentiality of this observation even further, exclaiming: “And look at that mountain!” When his partner does not react, Hope continues: “It may be a mountain to you, but it’s bread and butter to me,” and the Paramount logo appears over the snow-capped peak.

As traditionally used in a musical, Jane Feuer explains, direct address in the numbers violates the realistic codes of classical Hollywood narrative, breaking the diegetic illusion with a regularity that most other genres do not, in order to “signify the intimacy of live entertainment” (39) and to remystify the stardom of performers (113). Comedian comedy similarly relies upon “a direct performance situation,” as Frank Krutnik points out, to find its generic mechanism for incorporating the star personae of stage comics and for then drawing upon that extra-cinematic theatrical history with gags arising from the resulting disruption of the diegesis (“Clown”: 52).4 _{The Road to series obviously draws upon} conventions of both genres. However, disruptions of the diegesis in a Road to film are not confined to the musical numbers or to sight gags but define the entire road trip as a utopian adventure, rendering in non-narrative terms how, by way of its association with show business, the road represents the nation cohering around its popular entertainment as exemplified by Hope and Crosby.

According to Richard Dyer, entertainment is utopian because it “offers the image of ‘something better’ to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives don’t provide. . . . Entertainment does not, however, present models of utopian worlds. . . . It presents . . . what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized” (18). Musicals typically conflate the show and the dream in order to project this utopian dimension of entertainment. The result, in Feuer’s view, is a “solipsistic” vision of freedom, foreclosing “a desire to translate that vision into reality” because of the genre’s “endless reflexivity,” which ultimately “can offer only itself, only entertainment as its picture of Utopia” (84). Musicals, she continues, thus confuse the production and consumption of entertainment, just as they blur the distinctions between professional and amateur performances, giving mass art the value of folk art and disguising both the labor that goes into the product and the differences between the consumers of showbiz, its performers, and the economic institutions supporting it (22). This is no doubt why, in order to preserve their vision of cultural homogeneity as represented by the diverse talents working together to put on a show, when the wartime musical revues bring the spirit of the USO home to the US in a showbiz setting, they take it off the road by locating the show in a confined space – a studio backlot, a theatre, a canteen.

In the aptly titled Road to Utopia Hope and Crosby travel to “utopia” in two very different senses. On one hand, the Gold Rush narrative defines “utopia” as a place. Hope wants to leave San Francisco and return to New York City, but Crosby tricks him into going north to the Klondike instead. “It’s utopia there. Everybody’s getting some of that gold.” And indeed, this proves true, since Utopia is the only film in the series which allows at least one of the two travelers (Hope) to get the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. On the other hand, the film’s self-referentiality equates utopia with showbiz, displacing the desire for capital onto the pleasure of performing for an audience, which in its turn achieves the mutual identification of spectator and performer with America as their common “home.” Crosby’s two solos assert this utopian logic and register the contradiction motivating it. “It’s Anybody’s Spring,” sung in the amateur show aboard ship as an attempt to earn some money for his and Hope’s passage, maintains in its lyrics, in contradistinction to the narrative context, that money is not important because the best things in life are free; while “Welcome to My Dream” invites Lamour into a dream world of romance, overlooking the fact that Crosby has a map to a gold mine rightfully hers, which she is scheming to get back. Crosby’s opening number with Hope, set on a diegetic stage, works similarly. Their celebration of “Good Time Charlie” is the prelude to the confidence game (“Ghost-O”) that attempts to bilk the audience of their cash.

The Hope and Crosby films use the road to characterize popular entertainment as distinctly American, whatever its geographic setting.5 _{Their road is utopian insofar as it} perpetuates the illusion that the producers of showbiz are no different from the consumers of their product, and the series imagines this comparability by affiliating the road with the values of home through showbiz, thereby historicizing it in the 1940s’ valorization of entertainment as the condensation of American popular culture. However, the two entertainers’ apparent freedom from diegetic constraints in these films also points to the more complex economic relation of showbiz performance, the industrial conditions making it possible, and the nationalist ideology it serves. Hope’s reference to Paramount as his “bread and butter” in Utopia is in fact double-edged as an allusion to his labor as America’s most traveled entertainer. While he and Crosby were well-paid employees associated with the studio as their top star attractions, their popularity gave them the power to renegotiate their contact, and they were part-owners with Paramount of the Road to films that followed Utopia in the series (Marx: 223). Beneath the trappings of “home,” what their road trip ultimately confirms is Hope and Crosby’s status as producers of popular entertainment, quite literally so, as it turned out.