Word: bobbed
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...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; and, in "The Mask" and "Me, Myself & Irene," Jim Carrey to Jim Carrey...
...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...
...exhaustiveness in its 728 pages. For Giddins, that meant he sat through a lot more of the Crosby films than I could manage (and more of each film, I'll warrant: some of the '30s musicals almost demand fast-forwarding through the comedy specialties by Burns and Allen, Bob Burns, Martha Raye and others too grating to mention). Giddins is attentive and generous to Crosby's films, finding saving graces, vagrant epiphanies or sociological sassiness in each. He is also knowledgeable about the movie milieu, offering paragraph-long portraits of dozens of Bing's coworkers. The book ends with "Road...
...Arlen Specter and Bob Barr had their way with Clinton's dubious pardon back in Washington, the former president himself was plotting another brilliant p.r. move a bit further north. Tuesday, sources announced Clinton was abandoning his much-maligned quest for top-floor office space at a pricey midtown office tower in favor of a relative bargain in the heart of Harlem. Where General Accounting Office types and indignant Republicans had been up in arms over the midtown rental specs, Harlem's neighborhood boosters were beside themselves with glee - Clinton's presence on 125th Street was bound to invigorate...