ROAD TO UTOPIA: solid gold entertainment!

It's never happened before but while I was watching ROAD TO UTOPIA I found myself overcome with regret that I wasn't getting to see it on the big screen.
I've lost myself in films plenty of times before, wished the story would never end, and imagined myself living the life of the lead character, but this was the first time I'd actually felt that I wanted to pay money to sit in the dark in a big auditorium and watch a 64 year old movie play out.
Not because the small screen can't do justice to the special effects or the scope of the story but because ROAD TO UTOPIA epitomizes great cinema entertainment.
This is a really, really fun film and that is entirely due to the incredible chemistry between its two stars, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. They're not often among the first names raised in any discussion of great comedy teams of the cinema but that's what they were in the seven "Road To" movies they made together between 1940 and 1962. ROAD TO UTOPIA, released in 1946, was the fourth in the series and it's the jewel in the crown.
Both men are at the top of their game firing sharp as a tack zingers at each other almost faster than we can absorb them. By the mid 40s the public persona of both men were very well known to American audiences through their films, radio shows and Crosby's records, and the script is littered with gags about Hope's nose, Bing's crooning, and even the sponsors of their respective radio shows. Bob also gets in a couple of wonderful put downs comparing Crosby to Sinatra. This kind of topical humour often doesn't age well but in this case the jokes still work because the references have become part of showbiz legend in the intervening decades. 
But Hope and Crosby don't just bounce jokes off one another, they also sing, dance and romance Dorothy Lamour. They are a complete entertainment package which is more than can be said for most modern day film stars.

The plot such as it is concerns Hope and Crosby as a couple of second rate song and dance men who pass themselves off as a pair of desperadoes and head to turn of the twentieth century Alaska is search of a goldmine, but the real pleasure here is in watching two great entertainers at the top of their game and quite obviously reveling in each other's company. 
This kind of quality entertainment deserves to be seen on the big screen and clearly cinema audiences in 1946 were of the same mind. They made ROAD TO UTOPIA one of the top 10 films of the year. More than half a century later it's still not too late to find out why.