As everyone knows, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope starred in seven "Road to" movies. For no real reason, I started at the end and watched The Road to Hong Kong first! I have nothing to compare this one with, but it felt like a very well-oiled installment, with jokes and references to the previous flicks included in the dialogue, and with chemistry between the two leads that was obviously cultivated through the decades. In this last "Road" movie, Bob and Bing get mixed up in two very dated concepts: a space race with Russia and making fun of the Chinese. There are tons of mimics and offensive gags about the Chinese people and their culture, so if you're going to sit through this one, you'll need to expect and overlook those. With Joan Collins serving as the fodder for the love triangle, and a pretty cute cameo from regular cast member Dorothy Lamour, the rest of the un-offensive script is pretty funny. Bob and Bing have a constant push-and-pull relationship and their jokes are a great mixture of old-school vaudevillian banter and sixties sex comedy gags. While this was my first "Road" movie, I liked it enough to check out another. This one has really funny, unexpected cameos from Peter Sellars, David Niven, Pat O'Brien, Dean Martin, and Frank Sinatra! I can't wait to see what the other movies have in store!

An amiable excursion! Admittedly, Bing has lost a bit of the old bounce, but Hope is as enthusiastically ingenuous as ever. The team's old Road companion, Dorothy Lamour, has an ten-minute scene at the climax and proves that she can still hold an audience even though she hasn't been on the big screen since the 1952 Road to Bali. This time, however, the main femme role is taken by Joan Collins who certainly looks very alluring. On the other hand, her ultra-cultured voice tends to get a bit monotonous. It's also unfortunate that the screenplay has her spending the last twenty minutes of the movie in an unattractive Chinese coolie outfit. As we might expect, the screenplay employs some good gags and amusing situations – though some of the scenes could stand a bit of trimming, particularly a long encounter between Hope and Dave King (who plays a Chinese restaurant proprietor). Norman Panama's direction tends to be loose rather than tight, flaccid rather than taut. And the same remarks could be applied to the script. Sure, the plot is a ludicrous enough peg on which to hang various "in" jokes, guest star spots and the musical numbers, plus a bit of gentle ribbing. Unfortunately, at times, some actors choose to play the game perfectly straight – particularly Collins, Morley and Gotell – instead of tongue-in-cheek. Fortunately, other credits are up to par and the movie has been realized on a fair- sized budget, including even a tiny bit of location filming in Hong Kong.

'The Road To Singapore' ( 1940 ) starred Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. It was a winning team - Hope provided the gags, Crosby the singing, and Lamour the glamour. Five more pictures in similar vein followed. With 'The Road To Bali' ( 1952 ), it looked like the end for the musical comedy series, but a decade later it returned for an encore, which was filmed in England despite the title!'Hong Kong' has Bob and Bing as 'Chester Babcock' and 'Harry Turner', con men trying to sell a flying device that looks like the one Woody Allen used to escape security guards in 'Sleeper' ( 1973 ). During a demonstration, Chester loses his memory. Harry takes him first to an Indian doctor ( an uncredited Peter Sellers reprising his 'Milionairess' role in all but name ) and then to a Tibetan monastery. Chester is cured but then accidentally memorises a formula for space navigation, and agents of a mysterious organisation known as 'The Third Echelon' are after both of them. Luckily, one such agent is 'Diane' ( Joan Collins )...When I first saw this on television many moons ago, I assumed that Hope and Crosby were spoofing 'James Bond'. The S.P.E.C.T.R.E.-like 'The Third Echelon' hides out in an underground lair ( beneath sea level ) accessible through a secret entrance, employs agents in black, roll-neck jumpers ( worn by at least every spy at some point in the '60's ) and is led by a 'Blofeld'-like megalomaniac ( Robert Morley ). Their plan for world domination involves space rockets ( also the premise of 'Dr.No', the first Bond movie ). I was surprised to learn that 'Hong Kong' actually came out before 007's debut, meaning that Norman Panama and Melvin Frank beat all those spy spoofs to the punch by a few years. The titles were designed by Maurice Binder, by the way!Dorothy Lamour is unfairly relegated to a small role ( she's on screen for no more than five minutes ) while the main female role is given to Joan Collins, despite her having virtually no flair for comedy. Still it was good to see 'Dottie' again with the boys.The gags come thick and fast. One is 'borrowed' from Chaplin's 'Modern Times' - Bob and Bing are flying around in a space capsule and a machine feeds them bananas and milk ( the ship was originally intended to house monkeys ). The Hong Kong setting allows for racial stereotyping which probably would not be allowed now, but the most interesting scene is Chester and Harry's encounter with Sellers. It is the old guard of comedy handing over the baton to the new. Allegedly they tried to delete it as they felt the ex-Goon to be upstaging them.Loads of British faces on view - Dave King ( as a Chinese restaurant owner ), Roger Delgado ( later to play 'The Master' in 'Dr.Who' ), Walter Gotell ( 'General Gogol' of the Bond movies ), Felix Aylmer, and a fleeting appearance from David Niven! The ending has our heroes stranded on an alien planet, where they bump into Rat Packers Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin! Not one of the best 'Road' films by a long chalk, but Bob and Bing are always watchable. Too old? Well, they were in their sixties, but it would only have been a problem if they had been playing young men. They weren't.In 1977, Bob and Bing planned to make 'The Road To The Fountain Of Youth' but the latter's death made the project impossible. For better or worse, 'Hong Kong' was the end of the pair's long journey.

As swan songs go this could have used a decent cygneture tune. The best bit is right at the beginning when, continuing the tradition, Bing and Bob are seen as vaudevillians singing, dancing and pattering their way through 'Teamwork', with a lyric from Sammy Cahn, who had replaced Johnny Burke as Jimmy Van Heusen's permanent partner roughly a decade earlier. Plots were never a strong point in the franchise and this is, if anything, worse than most and for some unknown reason Peter Sellars is given several minutes in which to be wincingly embarrassing and utter some of the worst lines in the script. They also jettisoned Lamour as sex object but wisely allowed her a cameo appearance plus a ballad; her replacement, Joan Collins, failed to register and the best one can say about this product of the famous Rank 'Charm' School is that she clearly flunked charm. Following the opening vaudeville routine the plot continues in the way of the rest of the franchise with Bing conning Bob - here given Jimmy Van Heusen's real name, Chester Babcock, as an 'inside' joke - into the usual life-threatening stunts and for good measure we even get a laundry list of previous near-misses including the squid, human cannonball, etc but then it runs out of steam and quickly spirals into complete preposterousness. The banter is still intact albeit a little frayed around the edges but they could have signed off with something a little better than this.