There is the old cliché about quitting while you are ahead.  As such sayings can be ambiguous as to their meaning, I will provide you some examples as to why I am using it.  For athletes, the goal is, to borrow another well-worn phrase, to go out on top, preferably retiring with a championship.  This does not always work out well because people rarely follow this sage advice, in sports or cinema.  Michael Jordan won a sixth title with the Chicago Bulls in 1998, left the game, but then came back for another few uninspiring seasons.  As for Hollywood, one can look at one of the greatest comedy trios of all time, the Three Stooges.  That could be somewhat misleading as their roster changed over the course of the roughly four decades they were in show business.  Regardless, they piqued somewhere in the 1940s and were never quite the same afterwards.  I say this having once seen a list of the fifty worst films of all time with The Three Stooges in Orbit (1962) on it.  It takes a Divine wisdom, praying for the discernment of when God is calling you into the next phase of your life, to know when to transition.  This is advice I wish Bing Crosby and Bob Hope had followed after making Road to Bali(1952).  Instead, they decided to carry on ten years later with The Road to Hong Kong (1962).  Just as a preview for what you are about to read, Crosby should have never been in a motion picture that sees him in space having bananas shoved down his throat.

You would not know that The Road to Hong Kong would feature such indignity to one of America’s all-time great singers from the beginning.  Instead, you have the usual vaudeville act of Chester Babcock (Bob Hope) and Harry Turner (Bing Crosby) singing their way through the opening credits.  Once those are complete, we switch to the title city where representatives of the American government have intercepted a recording of a trip to the moon.  As they puzzle over how the Russians, who they believe have pulled off this feat, could have beaten them in the space race, they are visited by Diane (Joan Collins).  She tells them it is not the United States’ super power competitor, but a shadowy organization to which she used to belong called the 3^rd Echelon.  The voices they are hearing on the tape are Chester and Harry.  She then goes on to explain how these two bozos could end up as astronauts.  My apologies for not being charitable, but they do portray themselves as such.  Before they wind up as 3^rd Echelon stooges, they are hustling people in Calcutta.  They have invented a do-it-yourself flight kit, but their local test pilot has gone missing.  As often happens, Chester is conned into doing the demonstration, and his bungling forces them to make a hasty escape.  Their flight is not without incident.  Chester receives in bump on the head from the accident, giving him temporary amnesia.  After a useless (and slightly racist) visit to a local doctor (Peter Sellers), they decide to travel to Tibet to seek the advice of lamas.  Once there, they receive a potion that begins the process of restoring Chester’s memory.  Back in the Calcutta airport is where Diane first spots the pair.  She is there to meet a Russian agent who is to accompany her to 3^rd Echelon headquarters in Hong Kong with a rocket engine formula.  The person with which she is to rendezvous has a special marking on his suitcase.  This is accidentally picked up by Chester, and Diane immediately latches on to him.  He, of course, takes it as flattery.  Before they part, though, she slips the formula into his pocket.  With their new memory elixir, Harry senses an opportunity to scam audiences on the stage.  To test the theory, Harry has Chester memorize the contents of the pages containing the formula, then burning them.  It is only after meeting Diane in the hotel bar that he realizes their value, particularly after she realizes her mistake and offers him $25,000 for them.  Hence, it is on to the Chinese city where they meet the leader of the 3^rd Echelon (Robert Morley) and their head scientist, Dr. Zorbb (Walter Gotell).  On the way, another spy swaps out Chester’s draught for regular tea.  Without it, Chester is unable to give the information the leader wants.  In response, he decides to send Chester and Harry into space instead of the planned chimpanzees.  They get to the moon and back in an incredulously quick time, but enough goes wrong that the leader is now more desperate for the information locked in Chester’s brain.  His solution is to dissect the unwitting vaudevillian.  Diane’s attempts to intervene on his behalf, and because she is also in love with Harry since this is a Road to . . . movie, does not manage to get everything she needs.  Her pleas to keep trying are ignored, so she instead helps them to flee the underground base.  In the course of their trek through Hong Kong, Diane goes to get help and Chester and Harry end up running into Dorothy Lamour (as herself) as she is giving a stage performance.  Their desperate attempt to hide in the background of her show is not too successful, and they are recaptured by the 3^rd Echelon.  Luckily, Diane returns with reinforces from the American government, but this does not prevent her and Chester and Harry from accidentally being shot into space.  Still, their efforts have apparently prevented some kind of global domination plan on the part of the 3^rd Echelon’s leader, so hooray.  They land on a distant but habitable planet, and are able to special effects away Dean Martin (as himself) and Frank Sinatra (as himself) before “settling down” with Diane.

Actually, Harry tries to pull the same special effects stunt with Chester at the end of The Road to Hong Kong, but he is fighting it at the last moment.  Their original idea had been to “share” Diane, each getting her on alternate days, but then “resting on Sundays.”  This is meant to be a Christian joke, but for this Catholic it is in as much poor taste as the rest of the movie.  For starters, it is not flattering to Chinese culture.  Yellow face was, and is, a thing, and it is present in this film.  What is somewhat less demeaning, and of more interest from a Faith perspective is the visit to the Tibetan temple. For a moment, I thought the filmmakers were trying to make it to be a Christian monastery.  The monks that open the door for Chester and Harry look like any male religious one would see in a similar setting in the West.  It is also not too crazy of a proposition to think, at least initially, that they could be cloistered friars.  Though Tibet has not been a major center of evangelization for the Church, there have been missionaries in that region over the centuries.  Let us also not forget that Catholicism is a globe spanning religion.  All the same, it is later made clear that the people in these scenes are not to be taken as Christians.  Because the United States had little contact with Buddhism by this time, the characters and extras in these scenes look like what people in the West thought a monk should dress and act.  To that extent, I did appreciate the Grand Lama (Sir Felix Aylmer) telling Chester and Harry that strangers are always welcome at their place of worship to rest and recuperate.  I cannot say if this is a tenet of Buddhism, but it is definitely a part of Christianity.  As such, and this is true of much of what you see here, those who made the film were just relying on what they thought they knew.

What I am getting at here is that The Road to Hong Kong relies on stereotypes.  In addition to the absurdity of seeing Bing Crosby on a rocket ship, and other parts of that sequence, we get awful representations of other cultures and races.  Believe it or not, there was a seventh of these movies planned for 1977, but Crosby passed away before it could be made.  Who knows if it would have been any better?  Finally, having seen the seven that do exist, if I were to recommend one, it would be Road to Utopia (1945).