Best movie of this year hands down!

Very Cool!!!

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Copyright 11 April 1941 by Paramount Pictures Inc. New York opening at the Paramount: 9 April 1941. U.S. release: 11 April 1941. Australian release: 29 May 1941. Sydney opening at the Prince Edward: 21 May 1941 (ran 6 weeks). 8,220 feet. 91 minutes. SYNOPSIS: Chuck Reardon (Bing Crosby) and Fearless Frazier (Bob Hope) are American sideshow artists in darkest Africa. Chuck is always figuring out some wild money-making scheme while Fearless wants only to get back home. Two stranded girls (Dorothy Lamour, Una Merkel) persuade the boys to take them on a long safari. They run into cannibals, wild beasts, and other hazards. NOTES: Number two of Crosby/Hope's seven Road pictures. The first six were produced by Paramount. The last, Road to Hong Kong (1962) was a United Artists release. Zanzibar became a top box-office grosser in the U.S.A./Canada, and number 25 at Australian ticket windows for 1941.COMMENT: The second of the "Road" films. Like the first, Road to Singapore (1940), it will be a disappointment to viewers who are expecting the lively wit, the crazy asides to the camera, the side-splitting "in" jokes, the pungent satire and amusingly pell-mell situations of the later entries in the series. True, there are maybe six or seven attempts at wild spoofs, including an on-screen reference to orchestras suddenly blooming in the middle of the jungle, and the wacky use of sub-titles - one of them deliciously censored - in the madcap scene with the cannibals. But many of the gags, alas, are rather weak. And they are not made any funnier by the often too-strenuous efforts of Hope and Crosby to put them over. Aside from a few mildly amusing quips, it's painfully obvious that the principals are being made to work too hard to raise laughs. The strain shows in their exaggerated, top-of-the-voice portrayals.Shertzinger's often colorless direction with its long takes and routine camera placements, must also take its share of the blame. In fact, Schertzinger doesn't really come to life until halfway through, when he suddenly introduces an off-camera commentary. The action that follows, capped by that great scene in which the boys beat the graveyard drums that inadvertently summon the cannibals, is much more inventively staged and far more lively. Oddly, Lamour comes off best in the acting stakes. Her performance is light and charming and not overdone. Miss Merkel is okay. She is forced to spend the film in Lamour's shadow. The support players, however, - Douglass Dumbrille, Iris Adrian, the lovely Joan Marsh, Eric Blore, - have remarkably little to do. Production values are often helped out by spectacular stock footage (the circus fire, porters winding through the jungle, the massed attack of warriors). Photography and other technical credits are smooth as they come.

Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour are at it again in the second film of the "Road Series" which follows "Road to Singapore" produced a year earlier. However, although the three actors have returned their characters are completely different. For example, Bing Crosby plays a con-man named "Chuck" who is constantly coming up with dangerous acts to use in a circus. Bob Hope plays his best friend "Fearless Frazier" who is generally the one who risks his life in whatever dangerous scheme Chuck has concocted. Yet for all of their experience in the confidence field they somehow end up being taken for a ride by a woman named "Donna Latour" (Dorothy Lamour) and her friend "Julia Quimby" (Una Merkel) who manage to convince them to take them on a long safari through the African jungle but conveniently leaves out the real reason Donna and Julia want to get there—so that Donna can marry a young millionaire. But what none of the four realize is just how dangerous this safari ends up becoming. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that I thought this movie was a little bit better than its predecessor due in large part to the better coherence between the scenes. Likewise, the action was a little better as well. In any case, this was an entertaining comedy for the most part and I have rated it accordingly. Slightly above average.

This is the first Road picture I remember seeing as a kid on television, and my sister and I didn't get most of the Forties humor, but our Dad was beside himself at the part where the cowardly Bob Hope ( playing "Fearless Frazier", the courageous stunt man) has to wrestle a gorilla in a cage, while the natives place bets on the outcome. Dad was roaring with laughter at the way that both Hope and the gorilla were using classic wrestling moves on each other, which can still be observed in any pro wrestling match today, including body slams, head locks, Irish whips into the turnbuckle and pile drivers.Bob Hope has some of his best moments in this picture, including tickling a lecherous bidder at the slave auction at opportune moments, so the bad guy won't be able to increase his price for Dorothy Lamour; shrieking over a an obviously rubber snake he finds in his bed, wisecracking with Crosby as he 's about to be shot out of the cannon at the carnival as " The Living Bullet". Crosby is the usual smooth talking con artist, who persuades Hope to attempt such risky endeavors as being the Human Bat, flying on man made wings, the Human Dynamo, strapped in an electric chair with a light bulb in his mouth, etc. By the time Crosby tries to persuade Hope to wrestle an octopus, Hope has figured out it's better to turn down these great ideas.Romantic complications ensue when the boys get entangled with a couple of female sharpies on their way to marry a rich man. Una Merkel is the brains and Dorothy Lamour the beauty as they scheme their way across Africa. Hope is reluctant to join the safari, until Crosby points out that they're already on the lam from both the police for accidentally burning down the carnival, and a couple of menacing characters they sold a phony diamond mine to.Music, sight gags, ad libs and sheer silliness provide lots of entertainment. The parts with the natives are stereotypical, but already spoofs in 1941 of the serious clichés found for years in Tarzan movies. At one point, the native witch doctor argues with the chief, with subtitles in English, debating the possibly divine origins of the two explorers. The shaman points at Bob Hope and announces via subtitle " If he's a god, I'm Mickey Mouse!" Sit back, relax and enjoy some old fashioned movie fun, with Hope Crosby and Lamour in their prime.

This early entry in the Hope and Crosby canon may be their best. The Don Hartman gags are still fresh, and Bob and Bing are young enough to be romantic leads, which indeed they are. A spoof of the kind of jungle adventure movie popular at the time, one's enjoyment of this now more than sixty year old film may depend in part on the kind of movie it's making fun of, otherwise it might seem just plain absurd. It is anyway. Absurd I mean. Also very funny. The studio jungle looks like a studio jungle, which only adds to the air of the ridiculous, as does Bing's breaking into song at odd moments. Leading ladies Dorothy Lamour and Una Merkel are good foils for (as they used to call them) the boys. Good fun, and a great movie for the holidays.