Road to Morocco – 1942

The "Road" movies featuring Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour and Bing Crosby all share certain elements, particularly a loose and relaxed way in which the humor is allowed to dominate the plot, and probably the most extreme of this is Road to Morocco, often considered the best of the seven 'Road' movies (it seems to battle for first place with Road to Utopia for the 'best of" category).

In Road to Morocco, stranded in North Africa after accidentally sinking the ship they're travelling on, Orville (Hope) and Jeff (Crosby) are desperate to raise funds in order to eat, and fast-talking Jeff promptly sells Orville at the slave market. Orville is then placed at the palace of local Princess Shalmar (Dorothy Lamour) and is promoted to being the "temporary" husband-to-be for the princess, which, unknown to Orville, is a position meant to protect her actual love interest Mullay Kasim (Anthony Quinn). It seems that her royal astrologer has predicted her first husband will be dead within weeks of marrying, therefore Orville is meant to be sacrificed as "#1" and then the "real" marriage of Kasim and the Princess can take place. However, when Jeff learns that Orville is at the palace and is due to marry the princess and completely ignorant of the astrology predictions, he is determined to horn in on the arrangement.

All of the Road pictures have a certain informal style to them, and Morocco lets that go wild with regular "fourth wall" remarks made by the actors directly at the audience, inside-jokes about the studio they're working for (Paramount) and frequent one liners. These tossed-off remarks humorously editorialize on the film itself, 1940s politics, the genre of romantic-exotic adventure films, and of course remarks by the cast about the cast.

Dona Drake is on the screen as the Princess's chief palace handmaiden, and Anthony Quinn turns in a perfectly consistent effort at being the menace that keeps Orville and Jeff scrambling and conniving to stay alive, chiefly by employing a great deal of physical comedy and double-talk. Though Quinn's character starts off the film as the only romantic interest Princess Shalmar has eyes for, this changes as Bing Crosby begins to croon through the soundtrack with songs all written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke: Moonlight Becomes You, Constantly, Ain't Got a Dime to My Name, and We're Off on the Road to Morocco.

Including the audience in a film by talking to them directly can sometimes come across as pleading for a little sympathy for the film production or just experimenting in a way to fake-out film critics with some post-modernist magic, but in Road to Morocco it is an exercise of confidence. There were already two previous very successful Road movies, and the three actors here (Lamour, Crosby and Hope) were immensely popular, and the script and songs for the film are first-rate. In a way, watching Bob Hope address the popcorn eaters as intimates is a bit like a championship football team spiking the ball in the end zone.

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