If you need some laughs, this is a movie for you. I think this is the fourth of the "Road" pictures that Hope and Crosby made together. "The Road to Rio" was good, too, but the ones that followed demonstrated a flagging of inspiration.

Here, they are the crew are at their best. The plot is screwball, as usual, and not worth spelling out. What counts are the songs, the gags, and the interplay between the three principals -- Hope, Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour.

Most of the Road pictures had one or two songs which wound up on the pop charts. They were usually kind of pretty and unpretentious, "easy listening", to coin a phrase. (Oh, bring it back, sob!) "Moonlight Becomes You," "Personality," "Welcome to My World." And Bing did most of the singing in his smooth baritone. Nothing more than proficient and pleasant to listen to, although he belonged to, I think, a peppy vocal trio in the early 1930s whose arrangements were kind of original.

The gags were usually amusing, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. There was, inevitably the occasional clunker but everything was so good natured that they are easily forgiven. The script was by Panama and Frank, but many of the jokes were improvised on the set by the actors. Hope also brought in some gags from his platoon of writers (he was a famous radio comedian at the time),giving some of them to Crosby and Lamour as well. There was a good deal of playing with the fourth wall and a lot of in jokes too. Some of these may be lost on modern viewers. Eg., Hope is driving Crosby along on a dog sled, and he raises his arms and says, "Look Ma, no hands." "Look Ma, no teeth," remarks Crosby. "Please," says Hope, "my sponsor." His radio sponsor was Pepsodent Toothpaste.

The three principal actors play off each other well. Dorothy Lamour was an unpretentious actress of modest talents who never pretended to be anything else, although she provided a very nice frame to hang a sarong on. What I like most about the relationship between Hope and Crosby is the measured equality of their stupidity and greed. Hope wasn't really subordinate to Crosby. Everything Hope said and did was within the realm of human reality. He didn't have the flapping run or squeaky voice of Jerry Lewis. He didn't get slapped around like Lou Costello. He wasn't intellectually challenged. And Crosby was much more of a participant in the goings on than a straight man would be. He's hardly less gullible than Hope, and equally cowardly. When they're about to be boiled by cannibals or hanged by vigilantes, they trade wisecracks with one another. Crosby is the promoter and Hope is the stooge, but neither is superior to the others.

This really is a relaxing ride. I spent a summer doing a sociological study of Scagway. The set gives a surprisingly good suggestion of what it still looks like. It's a dramatic place overlooked by a proud glacier the color of blue glass. And the kind of Wild West atmosphere the movie evokes isn't entirely fictional. People had names like "Soapy Smith".

According to Turner Classic Movies, this movie was completed in 1944 but not released until 1946. Usually a movie being held this long is a bad thing--indicating, most often, that the movie is a dud. However, this great channel indicated that because the previous Hope & Crosby film was so popular, it stayed in theaters longer and the studio decided to wait until 1946 for "The Road to Utopia".

The style of this film is rather different from previous ones in two ways. First, the film begins with an elderly Hope married to an elderly Dorothy Lamour--the one and only time that Bob got her in one of the Road films AND the only one that is, essentially, entirely in flashback. Second, it is narrated by the raconteur, Robert Benchley, who interrupts the film periodically to make comments about it. But, as usual, this film still finds the two men as partners and chiselers. Their fraudulent stage act is discovered and they decide to relocate--heading to the Yukon and the gold rush at the beginning of the 20th century.

Along the way, the pair are mistaken for two famous killers, Sperry and McGuirk, and they take full advantage of it! Everyone in town is so afraid of them that they give them anything they want--and they plan on living like kings. Lamour and her confederates think the pair are Sperry and McGuirk and sets out to weasel the secret of a gold mine from them--a gold mine that they think they boys have but don't.

This film is pretty much what you'd expect, though Hope's one-liners are amazingly flat compared to other Road films. But, on the positive side, I liked how the film broke through the fourth wall repeatedly--making fun of itself, the studio and the roving commentary about the film by Hope and Benchley. As a result, it was a lot of fun--and a bit better than the typical Road film.

If you thought the talking camels in "Road to Morocco" were delightfully screwy, wait until you see what talks here. After a three year break between their teaming, the trio of Hope, Crosby and Lamour are back for their fourth entry. This time, they stay in North America, but are as far up north as you can be without going south again. The snow covered terrain of (presumably) the Yukon territory is a setting for plenty of action and thrills, with more comedy at every scene change.

They are on the search for gold, having ended up with a map to a gold mine, taken from two notorious cutthroats who stole it themselves. With the help of the lovely Dorothy Lamour, they end up with the loot, followed by the best ending of the entire series that deals with an obvious potential censorship issue in a very clever way.

This utilizes an introduction by Robert Benchley and wry commentary by him to move it along, plus a few songs to parody what they had already done successfully in "Road to Morocco". The title song from that is easily followed up by "Put it there, pal", a very funny inside joke. Lamour gets a good solo with " Personality", one of her best solos. The next film in the series, "Road to Rio", ranks as my third favorite, with "Morocco" as the best and "Utioia" second. I'm just sorry that they never did one called "Road to Rhodes".