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The "Road" films (the five major ones are the '40s visits to Singapore, Zanzibar, Morocco, Utopia — Alaska — and Rio) were screwy, all right, but pretty shrewd as character comedy of a high, broad stripe. With the help of their writers, Crosby and Hope perfected two hardy comic types: Bing the lordly overdog, smart and charming enough to get other folks to volunteer for the sucker's game; and Bob the scruffy underdog, too used to losing, too stubborn to give up. Bing was Bugs to Bob's Daffy; Dean Martin to his Jerry; Bill Murray to Hope's Martin Short; and, in "The Mask" and "Me, Myself & Irene," Jim Carrey to Jim Carrey.
Bing is the sharpie, the con man, the cad to men and women alike. He sells Bob into slavery in "Morocco," picks Hope's pocket of his boatfare in "Utopia," forces him into a dangerous highwire bicycle act in "Rio." And in a romantic canoe ride for two in "Zanzibar," he lets Dorothy do the paddling. Crosby never apologizes for his dastardly doings, and the plot rarely smites him with a climactic comeuppance. He is the singing scorpion; it's just his nature, though he'll deny it if you accuse him. "You know, way down underneath I'm honest," Bing says in "Utopia." Hope replies, "Yeah, but on top you're a rat." That was Bing in many of his movies: the rat on top.
Lamour was around in the first six "Road" movies, but her function was what Alfred Hitchcock called the MacGuffin — the trigger to the plot, the prize that Bing usually won from Bob. Women had to be in Crosby movies, the way songs and a standard-issue villain did. But these were jut narrative conventions. Bing was, if not a man's man, a guy's guy; women were ornaments to his self-esteem but not central to it. "In a lifetime of tears and laughter," he declaims with trembling sonority in "Rio," "it has been my discovery that friendship between two men is more important than friendship between a man and a woman. Duller but more important." Bing's orotund tone places ironic quote-marks around the speech, but in most movies he lives up to the sentiment. He has few hot smooch scenes; you rarely see him smolder with lust; his frequent come-ons to women are vamps, comic or ironic improvs on the required movie theme of heterosexual romance.
Giddins emphasizes the appeal of Crosby's masculine singing style, but the maleness was understated, like everything else about him, and it certainly didn't explode into eroticism. One could write long analyses of his personality (like this one) and never mention the word sex. The movies tried to make his aloofness part of his attractiveness. In "We're Not Dressing," "Rhythm on the Range" and "Rhythm on the River" his best friends are a bear, a bull and a boat. The women had the challenge of getting him interested, not just in women, but in the higher form of mammals.
The "Road" films were also famous for allowing the stars to speckle the script with their own bavardage, as usually supplied by the writers on the staffs of their radio shows. These weren't precisely ad-libs, but then this wasn't jazz, it was comedy. The point wasn't to be witty on the spot; it was to suggest an offhand wit that whispered to the audience: Nothing matters, it's only a movie. The blitheness was in keeping with Bing's radio personality, and probably with his real one. Bing enjoyed a genuine or seeming ad-lib; sometimes he'd use it like a mantra. In January 1950 Louis Armstrong, a guest on Bing's radio show, remarked that he had just concluded a tour of
Scandinavia. Did you "Skol" much? asked Bing. Satchmo's reply: "I was the skolinest cat in town." Bing loved this exchange so much he cited it in his autobiography "Call Me Lucky" and inserted it as Crosby-Armstrong repartee in "High Society."
'I USED TO BE'
Any book with three subtitles has the promise — indeed, the threat — of exhaustiveness in its 728 pages. For Giddins, that meant he sat through a lot more of the Crosby films than I could manage (and more of each film, I'll warrant: some of the '30s musicals almost demand fast-forwarding through the comedy specialties by Burns and Allen, Bob Burns, Martha Raye and others too grating to mention). Giddins is attentive and generous to Crosby's films, finding saving graces, vagrant epiphanies or sociological sassiness in each. He is also knowledgeable about the movie milieu, offering paragraph-long portraits of dozens of Bing's coworkers. The book ends with "Road
to Singapore," and one avidly awaits his consideration of Crosby's later film work: the rest of the "Road" series, the 1944 "Here Come the Waves" (with "Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive" sung by Crosby and Sonny Tufts in blackface, one of the latest films to use minstrel racism in a contemporary setting), the priest pictures ("Going My Way" and "The Bells of St. Mary's") and the mature work of the mid-'50s, when Bing finally grew up as an actor.
Crosby hadn't been a kid when he first starred in movies (he was nearly 30 when "The Big Broadcast" came out) and as his career ripened he had to adjust. In "Here Come the Waves" he was still playing a crooner who makes the girls scream, but here he was impersonating not himself but the younger Sinatra, who had become the bobbysoxer's rage. By the 1950s Crosby was part of a parade of aging male stars (Bogart, Cooper, Gable) making love to actresses young enough to be their daughters. For Bing, art was mirroring life: He was costarring with Coleen Gray, Nancy Olson, Debbie Reynolds and (twice) Grace Kelly, even as he courted and married actress Kathryn Grant, 30 years his junior — she was younger than some of Bing's movies!
He could have retired to the golf course and the bedroom (after having four children with Dixie Lee, he produced a family of three with Grant). Instead he took the role of Frank Elgin — a has-been musical-comedy performer whom drink has crushed into pulp — in George Seaton's film of Clifford Odets' "The Country Girl." Grace Kelly is his wife, ground down by drab devotion. William Holden is the Broadway director who wants to give him a last chance at stardom and self-respect.
"The Country Girl" is part hokum, part harrowing portrait of an old performer (we won't say self-portrait). Odets' form of dramaturgy is to load the dice against the Kelly character, then let her load the gun against Crosby and Holden. Crosby is the least shrill; that is part of his drunk's cunning. Frank lies in the same melodic, trombonish tone that Crosby had used to project sincerity for a quarter century. But when he's not pushing the blarney, he gives subtle glimpses of the decay that age and alcohol etches in a man. His face is fallen, creased with defeat, his posture hunched and haunted, his demeanor frail. Behind the old Crosby charisma was a self-confidence so pure that he didn't have to push it in America's face; but here he's playing a man with so little confidence that his face anticipates reproach. He's not the star he was, or the man. "Hey, aren't you Frank Elgin?" someone asks, and he murmurs, "I used to be." It is a brave and delicate consideration of decay, by someone who was finally in his acting prime.
The prime wouldn't last long. In fact, you could understand Crosby at his movie best in one double feature: "The Country Girl" and "High Society." He sings "True Love" to Grace Kelly (a stand-in for Kathryn); he bests Sinatra in their duet-duel "Well, Did You Evah." And in the four flavorful minutes of "Now You Has Jazz," with Armstrong and his band, Crosby displays his vocal and verbal acuity in top form. This song, like the one with Sinatra, was considerably revised — ad-libbed, if you like — from Cole Porter's text. Bing's asides are apt and inspired: when Armstrong sings "Frenchmens all/ Prefer what they call/ Lay jazz hot," Bing apostrophizes a très-français "formidable!" Satch, Trummy Young, Billy Kyle and the rest broil their venerable chops in a sweetly swingin' 12-bar blues. And Bing leads them, a simpatico impresario, with a suave verve. Beneath the famous Crosby savoir-faire, we for once sense the adolescent thrill he must have felt back in the mid-'20s, when he first heard Armstrong create the naughty form of music that Bing made nice.
He revs into the last vamp, does his patented airplane arm-swing and kicks the song into the empyrean, ending with a coda, "And that's jazz." Relaxed jazz, controlled chaos, ease and expertise — that is the style HE created. If Armstrong did hot, Crosby did cool, for the fattest part of the 20th century.
And that's Bing.