Rent Road to Morocco (1942)

Short, Fat, Hairy Legs — and a Talking Camel - Road to Morocco review by griggs

Took me twenty minutes to decide whether this was going to work, and the honest answer is: not at first. The opening's a slog, all shipwreck and bickering, with the plot waiting for something funnier to happen. Then it clicks, and the rest of it just gets on with the business of being silly.

I'd never seen a Road picture before this one, which made the whole thing feel weirdly familiar rather than new. Morecambe and Wise basically photocopied this. The winking at the camera, the bickering, the songs that undercut themselves halfway through — it's all here first. You can practically see "The Play Wot I Wrote" being written somewhere in the background. Once you spot it, you're watching the source material with the unsettling sense that the copy did it better. Eric Morecambe got the funny-man role right without ever being smug about it; Hope can't resist the smugness, mugging through every panic like he knows you're watching. Crosby drifts through half checked-out, and somehow that's still funnier than it should be.

Lamour gets more agency than the setup suggests — she plays along rather than just standing there as scenery. The exoticised love-interest stuff still hasn't aged well, mind, and casting a Mexican-born Anthony Quinn as an Arab sheikh just adds another layer of off.

The talking camel bit, though, is genuinely inspired — gets in, gets the laugh, gets out.

Influential, certainly. Just not always in the right direction.

Excellent if you suffer from nostalgia! - Road to Morocco review by AR

Some wonderfully nostalgic songs by Bing and Bob -' Moonlight becomes you' in particular. This film is very dated, but fun all the same - it contains the great line 'Like Webster's Dictionary we're Morocco bound ...'