The New Pictures, Nov. 23, 1942

Road to Morocco (Paramount) is interrupted midway by a Hapsburg-looking camel who remarks: “This is the screwiest picture I was ever in.” No strangers to screwballistics, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour may well agree with him.

Third in the series that began with Road to Singapore, this elaborate essay in slapstick is dedicated to the propositions that frenzy is fun and that even a cold-storage turkey can fly if its torso is Lamour, and if Hope and Crosby flap its wings. Neither proposition quite proves out.

Shipwrecked on Hollywood’s fixed idea of the North African desert, still unchanged since the days of Rudolph Valentino and E. M. Hull, Hope and Crosby ad-lib their way to a native village ruled over by Princess Lamour who retains the pleasant knack of looking undressed even when fully clothed. Already betrothed to a native sheik (Anthony Quinn), Lamour gives her affections first to Hope, then to Crosby. Tribesman Quinn’s desire for revenge touches off the Keystone excitement. Chief difference between Road to Morocco and its predecessors is that Hope also gets a girl.

The customers get a good run of gags. Says Hope, rope-netted to a dromedary’s side: “I never thought I’d end up in a camel’s snood.” The chinny comedian also does a female impersonation. Crosby, who marks his tenth movie anniversary with this film, celebrates the occasion by being in customary good voice. Best Numbers: Moonlight Becomes You, Constantly. Dorothy Lamour will probably pick up a few more votes as the Army’s favorite pin-up girl.

The Navy Comes Through (RKO-Radio). This run-of-the-mine slambanger comes through hell on three levels (sea, air and subsea) and large quantities of high water (the North Atlantic) while telling the simple story of the Sybil Gray, a munitions-laden laggard from a United Nations convoy. It comes through the mutual animosities of Chief Petty Officer Pat O’Brien and disgraced, re-enlisted Sailor George Murphy so predictably that by the picture’s end they are brothers-in-law (with the help of Nurse Jane Wyatt). It also comes through at the seams, so abundantly that it is sometimes hard to see the ballast for the bilge.

The picture’s message is that the Navy is not just a lot of equipment, but the men who man it. The trouble is that in this show the men are mostly a crew of waterlogged cinemactors. There is a gallant young Cuban (Desi Arnaz) who recites: “Your contry made my contry free, now I make your contry free.” There is a comedy gob, his mouth all corners, who keeps tuning in on the Dodgers, though any radio aboard would have been sealed* before the Sybil Gray sailed. There is a radio-tinker on whose set the Nazi code is at last unscrambled, bringing warning to his ship, danger to the enemy.

Jackie Cooper, Max Baer and others give these parts the earnest locker-room charm which is one of the best things about action pictures. In this heavily masculine maritime setting Cinemactress Wyatt is as out of place as a ladies’ first-aid drill on Henderson Field.

There is a lot of vociferous action, and a sense of the wartime sea’s lurking dangers. A gun, fired dead into the lens, is satisfactorily startling. In one terrific shot (made in combat) a Nazi plane, wrapped in a white fringe of fire, skitters on the sea like a pebble on a pond. In the closing sequence there is a cheerful, almost slapstick substitution of U.S. guile for U.S. courage which would have been inconceivable as propaganda in World War I. The crew of the Sybil Gray captures a U-boat supply ship and learns a Nazi trick of mining torpedoes with delayed-action detonators. Disguised as Nazis, the Sybil Gray crew replenishes three Nazi submarines with these mined torpedoes. A few seconds after each U-boat submerges, it is blown to smithereens. As the victims spume skyward the U.S. crew cheers as merrily as if Dick Rover had just pasted another one into the bleachers.

* Radio could be detected, would attract enemy subs.