THE ROAD TO UTOPIA
(Paramount)
‘THOUGH its brand of comedy is poles apart from that in Blithe Spirit; this new effort by the team of
Hope, Croshy, and Lamour is; in its way, just about as funny. If the one is a product of Mayfair, the other is just as plainly a product of The New Yorker and its characteristic style of humour, with some borrowings from the surrealism of Hellzapoppin’ dnd even (as Wellingtonians may recognise) from The Skin of Our Teeth. The story, which involves Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in a search for a gold mine during the Klondike strike, serves no other purpose than to provide a series. of pegs on which hang a preposterous © atray of gags and quips. The surrealistic touches include a talking fish, a talking bear, a shaggy dog with a stick of dynamite in its mouth, an encounter with Santa Claus in his sleigh amid the Alaskan snows, a vision of Dorothy Lamour in a sarong in’ the same setting, and frequent interpolations by the late Robert Benchley, who tries to explain the plot and the technique of the film as it proceeds. There are references to previous pictures in the series, and to the producing studio (an Alaskan mountain is suddenly transformed into the Paramount ° trademark); and there are also plenty of far-fetched puns (Lamour: "Don’t be facetious." Hope: "Let’s keep politics out of this.") Many of the jokes are good; some miss ' fire, but they « come so thick and" fast z
that the duds are not very noticeable. This is the fourth in the series of comedies which have already taken Hope and Crosby to Singapore (1940), Zanzibar (1941), and Morocco (1942), and it is quite the maddest and probably the funniest journey they have made to date. Yet I think they must just about have reached the end of their Road shows These esoteric jokes, these gags whicn demand specjalised knowledge on the part of the audience, are in some ways an unhealthy sign; they mean that the producing studio is feeding on its own fat. But such considerations apart, The Road to Utopia is good for a big laugh.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19460621.2.59.1.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 365, 21 June 1946, Page 32
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362THE ROAD TO UTOPIA New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 365, 21 June 1946, Page 32
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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