Cinema: The Groaner

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Out of the Paramount Studio in Hollywood last week came some of the most uninhibited, daffy nonsense to hit the U. S. screen since the heyday of Harold Lloyd. It was Road to Zanzibar, and its principal assets were two recruits from radio who bounced gaily through its inanities like a pair of playful puppies. For one of them, Bob Hope, it was the tenth film in a new and rapidly rising movie career; for the other, Bing Crosby, a dulcet, broken-toned singer who has confounded all the rules of show business for more than ten years, it was his 24th feature-length picture.

During his eight solid years with Paramount, Bing has played every type of character from a river romeo (Mississippi) to a rough sketch of himself (Sing You

Sinners). From the start he has insisted on having important stars around him, while his contemporaries were fighting for single billing. Last year, he teamed with Come dian Bob Hope in Road to Singapore, although Hope's ad-libbing prowess was supposed to be worse than death for any other comedian within range. Bing held his ground, and the result was one of the slap-happiest comedies of the season.

Road to Zanzibar makes no bones about being a continuation of these antics.

This time Crosby and Hope are a footsore carnival combination working their way through Africa. Hope, as Fearless Frazier, a harassed stooge who has to be shot from a cannon or wrestle an octopus, wants to get home to Birch Falls, Iowa. Crosby always interrupts the plan with a new enterprise. Before it is over, they take a safari through the jungle with Dorothy Lamour and Una Merkel, almost get eaten by cannibals.

The comedy hauled out of this unremarkable framework is one part radio, one part vaudeville, one part lunacy. The trail of the safari through the jungle is illustrated with an animated map. The voice of a commentator speaks: "Week after week they plod onward with nothing to guide them but the stars by night and the sun by day. . . . And so our safari is forced to rest—hoping to regain their strength with generous helpings of wart-hog stew." When a group of savages are arguing in their native tongue, very liberal English translations appear at the bottom of the screen. When Crosby tries to argue Hope into wrestling the octopus, he explains : "I'm trying to make you famous—people will write books about you." Cracks Hope: "Well, I know three words that won't be in 'em—'ripe old age.' " Bing-of-all-Trades. Road to Zanzibar is not a 100% movie. That is as it should be, for its star is not a 100% movie star.

He is a law student who turned to singing as a gag, and while making fortunes in cinema, the radio and the phonograph record business, has operated a race track, a horse farm, had an interest in two prize fighters and a girls' baseball team.

Harry Lillis Crosby, "The Groaner" to his friends, is also happily married to a trig, blonde lady who was once an actress.

He lives in a sunny, 14-room house with an adjoining tennis court and swimming pool where he roughhouses in off hours with four shiny, beaming sons. He plays par golf, and possesses an honorary Ph.D.

degree.