Road to Zanzibar

• Directed by Victor Schertzinger
• April 11, 1941

Two bachelors stranded in Africa, have jungle adventures when their lives intersect with two attractive con women. Bob Hope still does not get the girl!

First a word of warning to the more sensitive individuals who might read this and decide to watch Road to Zanzibar: don’t pay close attention to the depictions of Africans on the screen in the opening credits. Yikers!

Rather than being a direct sequel to Road to Singapore, this is another film in the series using the rough template established in the first movie along with many of the same core actors in different parts.

The humor is inoffensive but funny in this parody of the safari picture. Chuck Reardon (Bing Crosby) and Hubert “Fearless” Frazier (Bob Hope) are two con men looking to get rich quick meandering around Africa running various hustles. The one that gets them in trouble is Fearless as a human cannonball who switches himself out for a dummy. That flaming dummy sets a tent on fire putting them on the run.

I still have trouble accepting the instance that entwined Chuck and Fearless with Donna LaTour (Dorothy Lamour) and Julia Quimby (Una Merkel) was a con on the part of the girls. The two women are supposed to be short on resources yet have enough to create the appearance of a slave market? In a series where logic and plot are secondary to gags and music that is still hard to swallow. The useless diamond mine traded to them by the rich-yet-daffy Charles Kimble (Eric Blore) was pushing things.

Donna and Julia are barely better than two dimensional and exist more to create a point of conflict for Chuck and Fearless than to be actual characters of their own. Not that they need to be prominent but once they’re out of the scene their presence really isn’t missed in the movie. They have a few good moments, but not nearly enough.

In what can be seen as an inversion of what one would normally expect in a movie like this Donna and Julia when active in the story do more manipulating of Chuck and Fearless than the other way around. Donna and Julia when seen are the ones controlling things though once they leave the frame Chuck and Fearless regain authority. It would have been entertaining to watch them make the boys jump through hoops.

Sure it engages in questionable logic but it could have easily engaged in cartoon logic. Later films of his own showed Hope could sell the distinctly implausible. It gets closest to that area in the octopus scene but never into anything that could be seen as inspired by Looney Tunes. The silliest (and most WB) joke is the text involving the gibberish being used as a tribal language.

It’s better produced than the last one and certainly better directed. The first film in a series can often be a very rough draft and Road to Singapore was definitely a rough draft. This is a more polished version of what they did there. The jokes flow smoother with the improv the Road to… movies were known for blending more seamlessly than it first did. The jokes (both visual and verbal) get a figurative lantern hung upon them in such a way that highlights the humor but does not tell you this is where you should laugh.

This was not nearly as music filled as the original. Some of that can be blamed on the script being not originally intended as a second in the series though given the loose nature of the movies getting some more music in should have been easy.

With good jokes though not enough great music Road to Zanzibar is a fun movie. It’s not meant to be anything deeper than a light romantic comedy and does a fine job entertaining the viewer.