The high point in this latest Crosby-Hope perpetration comes in the first twenty feet of film with the terse announcement:

Costumes . . . . . Edith Head

Makeup . . . . . Wally Westmore

Copyright MCMXLVII Paramount Pictures, Inc.

Everything thereafter is sheer anticlimax, as a limp audience is held spell-bound in its seats, asphyxiated by what is without a doubt the worst in a long and dubious series of "Road" vehicles.

Devoted Hope fans will be sickened, and all others put to sleep, after ten minutes of this witches' brew of poor vaudeville and worse dialogue. For the womenfolk, der Bingle fights his way gamely through two or three songs whose only distinction lies in the fact that they are all composed of the same four notes.

Hitting a new high in mediocrity, the plot of "Road to Rio" lurches along pathetically from one tiny crescendo to the next, leaving in its wake the battered carcasses of every stock situation the film's makers could find on the Paramount lot. A picture with some fast, funny slapstick, or even a loud, nerve-numbing orchestra, could perhaps survive such a story treatment, but this one throws in the towel early in the evening.

Of the individual performances, Hope's is far and away the standout. He blows bubbles through a cornet. He even gets the mouthpiece stuck on his lips, which is certainly a new one from his bag of tricks. And when he pulls off a crack about Congressmen with all the finesse of a dinosaur laying an egg, he is really tops.

As a vaudeville team, Paramount's Gold Dust twins stage a hoary entangled-arms routine which, unfortunately, stayed behind when Wheeler and Woolsey left Hollywood by popular request around 1935. And when they combine forces with a trio of Latin musicians for a five-man hat-mixup act, the result is probably the unfunniest three minutes in film history, not excepting the newsreel shots of Pearl Harbor.

The one wise move in the picture was casting Dorothy Lamour as a victim of hypnosis to cover her obvious deficiencies as an actress. And this may not have been intentional.