Victor Schlesinger, who also helmed the second movie in the franchise, Zanzibar, may well have directed all the Road films had he not died tragically young (51) after helming The Fleet's In. Had he done so the franchise may have had more variable scores inasmuch as Schertzinger was one of a handful of film directors (another was Edmund Goulding) who also composed notable songs for their films - and Schertzinger went out in style given that the songs he wrote, with lyricist Johnny Mercer, for The Fleet's In, were some of the finest in the history of the movie musical. In 1939 no one was thinking franchise, in fact no one was thinking beyond a one-off entry pairing Hope and Crosby - who often cross-talked their way to their respective Sound Stages on the Paramount lot, and throwing Dorothy Lamour into the mix as love interest. The one-off aspect accounts for the fact that for the only time in the franchise Bing is given a solid background - in all the others both the boys are just THERE, usually performers of some kind doubling as flimmers but with no history whatsoever - as the Fifth in a dynastic line of ship owners but even then he has already teamed up with Hope from frame 1 and significantly Hope has no background. Schertzinger supplied the music for two of the five numbers - with series lyricist Johnny Burke - the duet Captain Custard and Lamour's solo The Moon And The Willow Tree but the standout ballad proved to be Too Romantic with music by James V. Monaco, then just coming to the end of a partnership with Burke. Anthony Quinn and Jerry Colonna, who would both feature in later 'roads' (Morocco and Rio respectively) were on hand and the banter between Hope and Crosby was in place but the 'realistic' aspect - Crosby is the despair of his family by preferring work to play, not a million miles away from William Holden's David Larrabee in Billy Wilder's Sabrina Fair, also a Paramount release - tends to impair the free-flowing zanyness of the rest of the franchise. Overall a modest entertainment that paved the way for several superior entries.
Review of Road to Singapore
