Tonight's Movie: Road to Morocco (1942) - A Kino Lorber Blu-ray Review

ROAD TO MOROCCO (1942), the third film in the long-running "Road" series, is part of the seven-film On the Road With Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Blu-ray collection from Kino Lorber.

ROAD TO MOROCCO followed the previously reviewed ROAD TO SINGAPORE (1940) and ROAD TO ZANZIBAR (1941), and I can easily say it's the best of the three films seen to date.

ROAD TO MOROCCO has a more coherent plot than its predecessors, with a screenplay written by Frank Butler and Don Hartman. The songwriters, Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke, also worked on ROAD TO ZANZIBAR, but here they outdo themselves with the title tune "(We're Off on the) Road to Morocco," and especially the classic "Moonlight Becomes You."

This time around Crosby and Hope play Jeff and Orville, aka "Turkey." After being adrift at sea on a raft following their boat exploding, they make it to land in North Africa.

Before long they're entangled with Princess Shalmar (Dorothy Lamour), who proposes to Orville because of a prophecy that her first husband will die within a week. Shalmar wants to ensure that her true love Mullay Kasim (Anthony Quinn) survives...but then she falls in love with Jeff after he serenades her with "Moonlight Becomes You." Needless to say, Mullay Kasim isn't happy to learn he has a rival for the beautiful princess.

Orville is dismayed to learn the princess doesn't love him, but he's not left out in the cold, as pretty Mihirmah (Dona Drake) falls hard for him. Drake is a delightfully energetic performer I'm always glad to see turn up in a film. Offscreen she was married for decades to Oscar-winning costume designer Travilla.

Needless to say, the whole thing is pretty silly, but I liked that this film had more of an actual story than the earlier films, which were closer to a bunch of comedy bits strung together. Lamour and Drake represent '40s movie escapism at its finest, and viewers can even glimpse pre-stardom Yvonne De Carlo as one of Lamour's handmaidens. It's easy to imagine stressed-out wartime audiences loving this one, and I enjoyed it over eight decades later.

ROAD TO MOROCCO runs 82 minutes and was directed by David Butler. The director of the previous two films, Victor Scherzinger, had sadly died in 1941, a few months before production began on this film.

The movie was filmed in black and white by William C. Mellor. The supporting cast includes Vladimir Sokoloff, George Givot, Leon Belasco, Cy Kendall, Dan Seymour, and Nestor Paiva, among a number of other familiar faces.

Kino Lorber's Blu-ray is an excellent print. The disc comes with a trailer, plus a "Trailers From Hell" trailer commentary by director John Landis; a featurette on Bob Hope; a short, COMMAND PERFORMANCE 1945; and a commentary track by Jack Theakston.

This disc, like four other films in the set, has optional English subtitles; only ROAD TO RIO and ROAD TO BALI are missing subtitles.

Thanks to Kino Lorber for providing a review copy of this Blu-ray collection.

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