Road to Singapore

Can you imagine The Road to Singapore with parts of Bing and Bob being played by Fred MacMurray and Jack Oakie? That was the original casting that Paramount originally had for this first of the Road pictures.

You can tell that they did not have a series in mind because the billing was Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour, and then Bob Hope. When MacMurray and then Oakie became unavailable, someone had the bright idea of putting Crosby and Hope together. By this time a certain rivalry had developed on radio. Both had been guests on each other's shows, forever trying to top each other with unscheduled ad-libs in the script. So the casting changes were made.

There's none of the surreal humor in this that characterized the later Road pictures because the formula wasn't there yet. But when you see Crosby and Hope trying to land a fish and later on singing the Captain Custard song, the chemistry is unmistakable.

The rest of the score by Jimmy Monaco and Johnny Burke consists of one of Crosby's nicest ballads, Too Romantic and a novelty song for all three of the leads, Sweet Potato Piper. The director Victor Schertzinger who was also a composer of note and Johnny Burke did a South Sea Island ballad for Dottie, The Moon and the Willow Tree.

So what would have been a routine film turned out to be a shakedown cruise for a lot of movie fun.