The Book on Bing Crosby: Bing Goes to the Movies

(2 of 3)

Most of his films played only minor variations on the familiar Bing character: the attractive individualist, long of fuse, quick to amuse, hard to budge. In movies Crosby was the anti-Cagney, the un-Cary. Where they stalked or strode toward chaos, he was happy to perch on the porch, hummin', whistlin' and singin'; his goal was to attain the bliss of inertia. "I just thought I'd sit here and smoke m' pipe," he says in one film, "and watch the effect of yon moon on the waves." One could almost peg him, in his subversive indolence, as the white Stepin Fetchit. In "Rhythm on the Range," "Waikiki Wedding," "Rhythm on the River," the Bing character just wants to be a cowpoke, a slowpoke, a catboat captain. These Depression-era fables portrayed him as a working-class hero who actually aspired to unemployment.

Thus he would be chided by his leading ladies for lacking ambition. His fans in the audience could easily dismiss the charge — why should Bing change? He's Bing! ("I am a tramp," he tells Mary Martin in "Rhythm on the River." "Always will be.") And by the end of each film he had persuaded Martin or Frances Farmer or Shirley Ross that there was glamour and rectitude in his being Bing. But one begins to wonder if Crosby didn't lack a certain ambition for his own film work. On the whole, the pictures he made in his prime are agreeable, disposable, undistinguished and often indistinguishable.

He was, of course, just a golden cog in the Hollywood dream machine — an employee in the studio era. But Crosby was also the architect of his own career, the man who got his radio and musical friends cast in important film roles, who would boycott the movie set, playing golf until a director agreed to put the song of a Crosby chum into a picture. He had plenty of say in who made his movies and how they were made. So he must have liked what he was doing. As with his singing, so with his films: He found an attractive formula and stuck with it. You might see his devil-may-care smile as passivity or irony, a graceful going through the motions. Or you might say — and this isn't a war crime, just the underachieving of a consummate pro who could have pushed himself to do more — Crosby coasted.

This is one reason his films don't resonate today. They are too square for cult audiences, too straight for gay ones. In the auteur era, his list of directors looks tepid. He made no films with John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges; or, in the termite underground, with Edgar G. Ulmer or Edward D. Wood, Jr. At Paramount, his directors were deficient in edge and elegance. They also lack retrospective cachet. You will find no fan web sites devoted to Wesley Ruggles ("Sing You Sinners"), Norman Taurog ("Rhythm on the Range," "Road to Rio"), Eddie Sutherland ("Too Much Harmony") or Victor Scherzinger ("Rhythm on the River" and the first two "Road" movies). His one film with Billy Wilder, "The Emperor Waltz," is the most negligible of that esteemed farceur's career.

The same charge, of taking the easy way out, can be made against Crosby's selection of music. The man had not only an ear for songs but an ear for gifted young songwriters. He got Hoagy Carmichael his first movie song: "Moonburn," interpolated into the Cole Porter score for the 1936 film of "Anything Goes." The same year, he gave a break to Johnny Mercer, who had followed Bing as one of the Rhythm Boys, by insisting that the Mercer tune "I'm an Old Cowhand from the Rio Grande" be used in "Rhythm on the Range." Mercer would write for Crosby again, notably a few songs with Harold Arlen for "Here Come the Waves" (including "Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive") and the Oscar-winning song "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening," with Carmichael, seven years later. Mercer was also a friend of Crosby and his first wife Dixie Lee, appearing in Bing's elaborate home theatricals.

Alas, neither Mercer nor Carmichael — nor Frank Loesser, another Paramount staff writer — ever became a regular contributor to the Crosby film-song repertoire. Instead, Bing stuck with his "Irish leprechaun" pal lyricist Johnny Burke and Burke's composing partners James Monaco and James Van Heusen. They fashioned some fine tunes for him, including "Swingin' on a Star" from "Going My Way" and the title songs of "Pennies from Heaven," "Rhythm on the River" and "Road to Morocco" (with its clever payoff: "Like Webster's dictionary/ We're Morocco bound"). But they were songsmiths of the high second rank. It's tantalizing to think of the songs a Mercer or Carmichael or Loesser could have written for Crosby — and how much richer they would have made his musicals seem and sound.

Well, there are always the "Road" movies — arguably the most enduring of the comedy series from the '30s and '40s. Superficially they were breezy comedy-adventures, Kiplingesque tales of two pleasant wastrels in a far-flung land. But they were really extensions of Crosby's and Hope's radio programs and personae: variety shows that were clogged with topical gags, inside jokes about golf and the horses, and light mocking of the stars' cartoon physiognomies (Crosby's ears, Hope's nose and chin). Crosby is heard singing of-camera and Hope asks, "Who'd be sellin' fish at this hour?" Another time Bob cracks, "Next time I bring Sinatra." The proceedings were unabashedly ridiculous: in one of many self-referential asides, a talking camel (never mind) dryly observes: "This is the screwiest picture I was ever in."