Featured Item – 15/05/2020

This week’s featured post is a letter from respondent Mary Pook of Brighton. The letter, written as a follow-up to one we had received from her  earlier that month, touches upon the types of actor and actresses that Mary believes to have been more prominent at the time. These, she argues, were those with ‘conventional good looks’ with ‘no character to speak of’. To emphasise her points, she recalls the experiences of her uncle and a friend (Patricia Hayes – who would go on to have a successful acting career), who she argues both experienced setbacks in their careers due to their more characterful looks.


Featured Item (01/05/2020)

Today’s featured item comes with a twist of mystery!

Taken from our collection of 35mm film cuttings, today’s item is three black-and-white still frames, seemingly of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. This suggests that it is possibly from one of the first five Road To… series of films: Road to Singapore (1940), Road to Zanzibar (1941), Road to Morocco (1942), Road to Utopia (1946), or, Road to Rio (1947). The final two films of the series – Road to Bali (1952) and The Road to Hong Kong (1962) – were released in colour.

The series typically featured the all-star cast of Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Dorothy Lamour, though Lamour’s role was reduced to a cameo in the final film with the younger Joan Collins instead taking the female lead role. Though often remembered for mixing adventure with musical numbers and comedy, each film satirised common genre tropes and themes of the time. Yet, some readers may now better recognise tropes and themes of the Road To… series itself through a number of episodes of the American animated television series Family Guy (Fox, 1999 – ). Eight episodes have now featured a ‘Road To…’ prefix, and feature the characters embarking on a series of absurd adventures, including moments of song and dance, satirising and paying homage to the original series.

It is worth noting that Crosby and Hope shared two other starring credits, for Star Spangled Rhythm (1942) and Variety Girl (1947), both of which are also black-and-white musicals. Could this still be from either of these films?

So, do you know which film this still is from? If so, let us know via Twitter @cinema_memory!