The Road to Hollywood

This film may not be excellent by 2014 standards, or even by 1947 standards, but it is excellent from the point of view of a pseudo-documentary (a pretend biography for Bing Crosby) that uses archival footage from early Bing Crosby films, even Mack Sennett comedies.

The special effects are terrible by our standards, but it's fun to see what our ancestors were able to do with that old acetate.

For all we know, some of this early footage might have been lost if it weren't for the fact that it was used in this later film. (I'm no expert, so I'm just guessing.) You'll have to use your imagination to bring the quality of the sound track up to what we grew to love about Bing's singing in later films, but I listed to his songs in this film with my mind's ear, not my physical ear, if you know what I mean.

The film is totally fictionalized, but it is a lot of fun to see what our old directors and producers could do by cutting and pasting old footage together to make a new whole.

As noted by another reviewer, there is one segment that included Crosby in blackface, but in my opinion, it was not done in a racial manner. Instead, it seems to have been played in a comedic style, with Crosby accidentally getting sprayed with black paint while he's peeking through a fence. But I also have to admit that I will understand that some people will think of it only as a racial comment. (The other two "black actors" in that segment appeared to be black actors, so the original director in the 1930's might have been making a sarcastic comment about even earlier directors who refused to hire black actors, and only used white actors in blackface to play black roles.

John