Word: binging
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...What the audience heard was, to their ears, pure Bu-bu-bu-bing: a distilled, romanticized, possibly fictionalized version of himself. With his regulars (comedian Bob Burns, announcer Ken Carpenter, Jimmy Dorsey's band and then John Scott Trotter's) and a guest list of movie folk, jazzmen and classical musicians, Crosby promoted an air of at-home geniality, ad-lib bon-vivance - almost all of it scripted by Carroll Carroll. The writer shaped and sharpened (that is to say, softened) Crosby's public personality, as other scripters would do in the films. Giddins says Carroll allowed "Bing...
...Marion Davies in "Going Hollywood." The plot was instantly familiar from the Sennett shorts: a girl (Marion Davies) falls in love with the voice of her radio Romeo. ("Oh, she mewls, "you're just a voice that croons about something that once was real.") In a nice melodramatic turn, Bing plays a man driven to drink by despair - an ancestor to his Oscar-nominated role in "The Country Girl." In 1932, though, Bing really did have problems with alcohol. Here, acting was autobiography...
...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...
...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...
...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...