Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 1946

The Contenders:

The Blue Dahlia
Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis)
Notorious
Road to Utopia
The Seventh Veil (winner)

Road to Utopia

Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on laptop.

I’m always a little surprised when I like Bing Crosby in a film. I’m not sure why, but I tend to whenever I see him. For whatever reason, he was immediately likeable on screen. Strangely, I have the exact opposite impression of Bob Hope. With Hope, I get it, though. Hope’s persona was as someone who couldn’t keep his hands of the closest woman. I remember vividly having to watch The Paleface for the 1001 Movies List. In that film, his entire schtick consists of staring at Jane Russell’s tits and barking. With Road to Utopia, we get Crosby and Hope, which is curious for me.

This is my first Bing and Bob “road” picture, so I’m not sure if the amount of fourth wall breaks and meta moments are par for the course or not. It wouldn’t surprise me, since that also seemed to frequently be a part of Hope’s schtick. In this case, though, a big part of this are narration breaks from comedian Robert Benchley. He starts the film, in fact, by telling us that the studio hired him to explain the plot, since it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Benchley pops up throughout the film to explain a couple of scenes and make a couple of jokes.