--- title: The Book on Bing Crosby: Bing Goes to the Movies description: Bing Crosby was one of the very few new stars of the early talking pictures — we can't think of another — who hadn't previously... canonical: https://time.com/archive/6912568/the-book-on-bing-crosby-bing-goes-to-the-movies/ author: Richard Corliss article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2001-02-16T05:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-22T16:55:10.642Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: The Book on Bing Crosby: Bing Goes to the Movies og:description: Bing Crosby was one of the very few new stars of the early talking pictures — we can't think of another — who hadn't previously... og:url: https://time.com/archive/6912568/the-book-on-bing-crosby-bing-goes-to-the-movies/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Book on Bing Crosby: Bing Goes to the Movies twitter:description: Bing Crosby was one of the very few new stars of the early talking pictures — we can't think of another — who hadn't previously... twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # The Book on Bing Crosby: Bing Goes to the Movies > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) Feb 16, 2001 5:00 AM UTC by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) Feb 16, 2001 5:00 AM UTC Bing Crosby was one of the very few new stars of the early talking pictures — we can’t think of another — who hadn’t previously been paid to talk. Most of the other imports to Hollywood had honed their verbal skills on the Broadway or vaudeville stage; reading dialogue was nothing new to them. Crosby had read only lyrics: he was a singer, part of Paul Whiteman’s trio The Rhythm Boys. Who could even guess that, when the group broke up in 1930, Bing would be successful as a solo singer, let alone as a movie idol? He surely lacked demonstrable dreamboat features. His slight shoulders led down to a slight paunch. His hair was already receding. In his first solo film, “I Surrender, Dear,” there is a brief shot, as he runs from a house, of Bing without his toupee; not a pretty sight. Often he was too lazy to apply a hairpiece, so in movies he’d wear hats or caps with little plot justification. Most noticeable were his Babar ears; they made him look, one studio exec complained, “like a taxi with both doors open.” (Crosby, who refused the mogul’s demand that he have his ears taped to his head, did allow them to become a friendly butt of humor in his later career.) What one movie boss supposedly said after seeing a Fred Astaire screen test — “Can’t act. Can’t sing. Balding. Can dance a little” — could be applied to the young Crosby by switching the “sing” and “dance.” But as Gary Giddins amply demonstrates in his biography “Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, The Early Years, 1903-1940,” Bing was an instant hit on records and radio, and in the movies. He starred in Paramount’s “The Big Broadcast” of 1932 and would stay at the studio for 24 years, through 60 or so features, including six “Road” movies, three films with “Rhythm” in the title, two versions of “Anything Goes” and “Going My Way,” which won him an Oscar as Best Actor. His career could have won him a lifetime award as Biggest Star. Or very nearly. He was the No. 1 box-office star five times (the only one between 1915 and 1980). After their first runs, “Going My Way” was the top-grossing film in Paramount’s history, and “The Bells of St. Mary’s” the top grosser in RKO history. What was Crosby’s secret? The seamlessness, the integrity of the package: His smooth, pleasant face perfectly suited his smooth, pleasant voice and the casual wit of his professional personality. One would call the Crosby style debonair, if the word didn’t suggest class. Bing was of every class and none; his trick was to elevate the Joe Average attitude to a kind of masculine chic. It was an attitude, of a man at ease with himself and his success, that would help him dominate entertainment until the ’50s. In pop-cultural history — Jolson to Crosby to Elvis — Bing was the calm before the storm. You can see the Crosby style full-born in “I Surrender, Dear” (1931), the first of nine short films he would make for producer Mack Sennett. Already he is cast as himself, sort of: “Bing Crosby.” Already he is the famous singer all the girls adore. Already he plays pranks on the unwary and has a comedy abettor, an ur-Hope wise guy played by Arthur Stone. Somehow, though, he made the prankishness look like the inevitable spillover of a frat-house exuberance. Most significant, he also exudes that insouciance that made his dialogue sound like an ad lib. When a large angry man shoots a gun at his feet, Bing simply nonchalants, “Whatta hubba.” And at the end of his one big speech, telling off a pretty girl’s disapproving mom with a final “Nerts!”, he turns to storm out the door but instead accidentally walks into a dresser. Quickly he murmurs, “My sense of direction is a little askew,” and exits. Maybe Sennett couldn’t afford a Take Two, but he had to love Crosby’s aplomb in the face of embarrassment. So, for a long time, did movie audiences. Crosby proved he could handle a silent-screen diva when he costarred with Marion Davies in “Going Hollywood.” The plot was instantly familiar from the Sennett shorts: a girl (Marion Davies) falls in love with the voice of her radio Romeo. (“Oh, she mewls, “you’re just a voice that croons about something that once was real.”) In a nice melodramatic turn, Bing plays a man driven to drink by despair — an ancestor to his Oscar-nominated role in “The Country Girl.” In 1932, though, Bing really did have problems with alcohol. Here, acting was autobiography. LAZYBONES The character he played in movies was honed on radio. As Giddins notes, Crosby enjoyed the most sustained radio stardom of any network performer, 1931–61\. For more than a decade he fronted the “Kraft Music Hall,” which had a bigger audience in the ’30s than “Survivor” has today. Fifty million listeners a week: relative to the population then and now, those are Super Bowl numbers. What the audience heard was, to their ears, pure Bu-bu-bu-bing: a distilled, romanticized, possibly fictionalized version of himself. With his regulars (comedian Bob Burns, announcer Ken Carpenter, Jimmy Dorsey’s band and then John Scott Trotter’s) and a guest list of movie folk, jazzmen and classical musicians, Crosby promoted an air of at-home geniality, ad-lib bon-vivance — almost all of it scripted by Carroll Carroll. The writer shaped and sharpened (that is to say, softened) Crosby’s public personality, as other scripters would do in the films. Giddins says Carroll allowed “Bing to be Bing, only more so.” He added flourishes to Crosby’s facility for mixing sesquipedalian phraseology with hipster slang. One tangy aside was apparently not written by Carroll. After a solo by one-armed trumpeter Wingy Malone, Bing quipped, “Man, that was dirtier than a Russian horse-doctor’s valise.” Most of his films played only minor variations on the familiar Bing character: the attractive individualist, long of fuse, quick to amuse, hard to budge. In movies Crosby was the anti-Cagney, the un-Cary. Where they stalked or strode toward chaos, he was happy to perch on the porch, hummin’, whistlin’ and singin’; his goal was to attain the bliss of inertia. “I just thought I’d sit here and smoke m’ pipe,” he says in one film, “and watch the effect of yon moon on the waves.” One could almost peg him, in his subversive indolence, as the white Stepin Fetchit. In “Rhythm on the Range,” “Waikiki Wedding,” “Rhythm on the River,” the Bing character just wants to be a cowpoke, a slowpoke, a catboat captain. These Depression-era fables portrayed him as a working-class hero who actually aspired to unemployment. Thus he would be chided by his leading ladies for lacking ambition. His fans in the audience could easily dismiss the charge — why should Bing change? He’s Bing! (“I am a tramp,” he tells Mary Martin in “Rhythm on the River.” “Always will be.”) And by the end of each film he had persuaded Martin or Frances Farmer or Shirley Ross that there was glamour and rectitude in his being Bing. But one begins to wonder if Crosby didn’t lack a certain ambition for his own film work. On the whole, the pictures he made in his prime are agreeable, disposable, undistinguished and often indistinguishable. He was, of course, just a golden cog in the Hollywood dream machine — an employee in the studio era. But Crosby was also the architect of his own career, the man who got his radio and musical friends cast in important film roles, who would boycott the movie set, playing golf until a director agreed to put the song of a Crosby chum into a picture. He had plenty of say in who made his movies and how they were made. So he must have liked what he was doing. As with his singing, so with his films: He found an attractive formula and stuck with it. You might see his devil-may-care smile as passivity or irony, a graceful going through the motions. Or you might say — and this isn’t a war crime, just the underachieving of a consummate pro who could have pushed himself to do more — Crosby coasted. This is one reason his films don’t resonate today. They are too square for cult audiences, too straight for gay ones. In the auteur era, his list of directors looks tepid. He made no films with John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges; or, in the termite underground, with Edgar G. Ulmer or Edward D. Wood, Jr. At Paramount, his directors were deficient in edge and elegance. They also lack retrospective cachet. You will find no fan web sites devoted to Wesley Ruggles (“Sing You Sinners”), Norman Taurog (“Rhythm on the Range,” “Road to Rio”), Eddie Sutherland (“Too Much Harmony”) or Victor Scherzinger (“Rhythm on the River” and the first two “Road” movies). His one film with Billy Wilder, “The Emperor Waltz,” is the most negligible of that esteemed farceur’s career. The same charge, of taking the easy way out, can be made against Crosby’s selection of music. The man had not only an ear for songs but an ear for gifted young songwriters. He got Hoagy Carmichael his first movie song: “Moonburn,” interpolated into the Cole Porter score for the 1936 film of “Anything Goes.” The same year, he gave a break to Johnny Mercer, who had followed Bing as one of the Rhythm Boys, by insisting that the Mercer tune “I’m an Old Cowhand from the Rio Grande” be used in “Rhythm on the Range.” Mercer would write for Crosby again, notably a few songs with Harold Arlen for “Here Come the Waves” (including “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive”) and the Oscar-winning song “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening,” with Carmichael, seven years later. Mercer was also a friend of Crosby and his first wife Dixie Lee, appearing in Bing’s elaborate home theatricals. Alas, neither Mercer nor Carmichael — nor Frank Loesser, another Paramount staff writer — ever became a regular contributor to the Crosby film-song repertoire. Instead, Bing stuck with his “Irish leprechaun” pal lyricist Johnny Burke and Burke’s composing partners James Monaco and James Van Heusen. They fashioned some fine tunes for him, including “Swingin’ on a Star” from “Going My Way” and the title songs of “Pennies from Heaven,” “Rhythm on the River” and “Road to Morocco” (with its clever payoff: “Like Webster’s dictionary/ We’re Morocco bound”). But they were songsmiths of the high second rank. It’s tantalizing to think of the songs a Mercer or Carmichael or Loesser could have written for Crosby — and how much richer they would have made his musicals seem and sound. Well, there are always the “Road” movies — arguably the most enduring of the comedy series from the ’30s and ’40s. Superficially they were breezy comedy-adventures, Kiplingesque tales of two pleasant wastrels in a far-flung land. But they were really extensions of Crosby’s and Hope’s radio programs and personae: variety shows that were clogged with topical gags, inside jokes about golf and the horses, and light mocking of the stars’ cartoon physiognomies (Crosby’s ears, Hope’s nose and chin). Crosby is heard singing of-camera and Hope asks, “Who’d be sellin’ fish at this hour?” Another time Bob cracks, “Next time I bring Sinatra.” The proceedings were unabashedly ridiculous: in one of many self-referential asides, a talking camel (never mind) dryly observes: “This is the screwiest picture I was ever in.” The “Road” films (the five major ones are the ’40s visits to Singapore, Zanzibar, Morocco, Utopia — Alaska — and Rio) were screwy, all right, but pretty shrewd as character comedy of a high, broad stripe. With the help of their writers, Crosby and Hope perfected two hardy comic types: Bing the lordly overdog, smart and charming enough to get other folks to volunteer for the sucker’s game; and Bob the scruffy underdog, too used to losing, too stubborn to give up. Bing was Bugs to Bob’s Daffy; Dean Martin to his Jerry; Bill Murray to Hope’s Martin Short; and, in “The Mask” and “Me, Myself & Irene,” Jim Carrey to Jim Carrey. Bing is the sharpie, the con man, the cad to men and women alike. He sells Bob into slavery in “Morocco,” picks Hope’s pocket of his boatfare in “Utopia,” forces him into a dangerous highwire bicycle act in “Rio.” And in a romantic canoe ride for two in “Zanzibar,” he lets Dorothy do the paddling. Crosby never apologizes for his dastardly doings, and the plot rarely smites him with a climactic comeuppance. He is the singing scorpion; it’s just his nature, though he’ll deny it if you accuse him. “You know, way down underneath I’m honest,” Bing says in “Utopia.” Hope replies, “Yeah, but on top you’re a rat.” That was Bing in many of his movies: the rat on top. Lamour was around in the first six “Road” movies, but her function was what Alfred Hitchcock called the MacGuffin — the trigger to the plot, the prize that Bing usually won from Bob. Women had to be in Crosby movies, the way songs and a standard-issue villain did. But these were jut narrative conventions. Bing was, if not a man’s man, a guy’s guy; women were ornaments to his self-esteem but not central to it. “In a lifetime of tears and laughter,” he declaims with trembling sonority in “Rio,” “it has been my discovery that friendship between two men is more important than friendship between a man and a woman. Duller but more important.” Bing’s orotund tone places ironic quote-marks around the speech, but in most movies he lives up to the sentiment. He has few hot smooch scenes; you rarely see him smolder with lust; his frequent come-ons to women are vamps, comic or ironic improvs on the required movie theme of heterosexual romance. Giddins emphasizes the appeal of Crosby’s masculine singing style, but the maleness was understated, like everything else about him, and it certainly didn’t explode into eroticism. One could write long analyses of his personality (like this one) and never mention the word sex. The movies tried to make his aloofness part of his attractiveness. In “We’re Not Dressing,” “Rhythm on the Range” and “Rhythm on the River” his best friends are a bear, a bull and a boat. The women had the challenge of getting him interested, not just in women, but in the higher form of mammals. The “Road” films were also famous for allowing the stars to speckle the script with their own bavardage, as usually supplied by the writers on the staffs of their radio shows. These weren’t precisely ad-libs, but then this wasn’t jazz, it was comedy. The point wasn’t to be witty on the spot; it was to suggest an offhand wit that whispered to the audience: Nothing matters, it’s only a movie. The blitheness was in keeping with Bing’s radio personality, and probably with his real one. Bing enjoyed a genuine or seeming ad-lib; sometimes he’d use it like a mantra. In January 1950 Louis Armstrong, a guest on Bing’s radio show, remarked that he had just concluded a tour of Scandinavia. Did you “Skol” much? asked Bing. Satchmo’s reply: “I was the skolinest cat in town.” Bing loved this exchange so much he cited it in his autobiography “Call Me Lucky” and inserted it as Crosby-Armstrong repartee in “High Society.” ‘I USED TO BE’ Any book with three subtitles has the promise — indeed, the threat — of exhaustiveness in its 728 pages. For Giddins, that meant he sat through a lot more of the Crosby films than I could manage (and more of each film, I’ll warrant: some of the ’30s musicals almost demand fast-forwarding through the comedy specialties by Burns and Allen, Bob Burns, Martha Raye and others too grating to mention). Giddins is attentive and generous to Crosby’s films, finding saving graces, vagrant epiphanies or sociological sassiness in each. He is also knowledgeable about the movie milieu, offering paragraph-long portraits of dozens of Bing’s coworkers. The book ends with “Road to Singapore,” and one avidly awaits his consideration of Crosby’s later film work: the rest of the “Road” series, the 1944 “Here Come the Waves” (with “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive” sung by Crosby and Sonny Tufts in blackface, one of the latest films to use minstrel racism in a contemporary setting), the priest pictures (“Going My Way” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s”) and the mature work of the mid-’50s, when Bing finally grew up as an actor. Crosby hadn’t been a kid when he first starred in movies (he was nearly 30 when “The Big Broadcast” came out) and as his career ripened he had to adjust. In “Here Come the Waves” he was still playing a crooner who makes the girls scream, but here he was impersonating not himself but the younger Sinatra, who had become the bobbysoxer’s rage. By the 1950s Crosby was part of a parade of aging male stars (Bogart, Cooper, Gable) making love to actresses young enough to be their daughters. For Bing, art was mirroring life: He was costarring with Coleen Gray, Nancy Olson, Debbie Reynolds and (twice) Grace Kelly, even as he courted and married actress Kathryn Grant, 30 years his junior — she was younger than some of Bing’s movies! He could have retired to the golf course and the bedroom (after having four children with Dixie Lee, he produced a family of three with Grant). Instead he took the role of Frank Elgin — a has-been musical-comedy performer whom drink has crushed into pulp — in George Seaton’s film of Clifford Odets’ “The Country Girl.” Grace Kelly is his wife, ground down by drab devotion. William Holden is the Broadway director who wants to give him a last chance at stardom and self-respect. “The Country Girl” is part hokum, part harrowing portrait of an old performer (we won’t say self-portrait). Odets’ form of dramaturgy is to load the dice against the Kelly character, then let her load the gun against Crosby and Holden. Crosby is the least shrill; that is part of his drunk’s cunning. Frank lies in the same melodic, trombonish tone that Crosby had used to project sincerity for a quarter century. But when he’s not pushing the blarney, he gives subtle glimpses of the decay that age and alcohol etches in a man. His face is fallen, creased with defeat, his posture hunched and haunted, his demeanor frail. Behind the old Crosby charisma was a self-confidence so pure that he didn’t have to push it in America’s face; but here he’s playing a man with so little confidence that his face anticipates reproach. He’s not the star he was, or the man. “Hey, aren’t you Frank Elgin?” someone asks, and he murmurs, “I used to be.” It is a brave and delicate consideration of decay, by someone who was finally in his acting prime. The prime wouldn’t last long. In fact, you could understand Crosby at his movie best in one double feature: “The Country Girl” and “High Society.” He sings “True Love” to Grace Kelly (a stand-in for Kathryn); he bests Sinatra in their duet-duel “Well, Did You Evah.” And in the four flavorful minutes of “Now You Has Jazz,” with Armstrong and his band, Crosby displays his vocal and verbal acuity in top form. This song, like the one with Sinatra, was considerably revised — ad-libbed, if you like — from Cole Porter’s text. Bing’s asides are apt and inspired: when Armstrong sings “Frenchmens all/ Prefer what they call/ Lay jazz hot,” Bing apostrophizes a très-français “formidable!” Satch, Trummy Young, Billy Kyle and the rest broil their venerable chops in a sweetly swingin’ 12-bar blues. And Bing leads them, a simpatico impresario, with a suave verve. Beneath the famous Crosby savoir-faire, we for once sense the adolescent thrill he must have felt back in the mid-’20s, when he first heard Armstrong create the naughty form of music that Bing made nice. He revs into the last vamp, does his patented airplane arm-swing and kicks the song into the empyrean, ending with a coda, “And that’s jazz.” Relaxed jazz, controlled chaos, ease and expertise — that is the style HE created. If Armstrong did hot, Crosby did cool, for the fattest part of the 20th century. 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