On an Island With You was director Richard Thorpe’s fourth film to star the shimmering sea creature Esther Williams.
I didn’t get a chance to see the last film they made together, This Time for Keeps (1947), but I enjoyed On an Island With You a lot more than their second collaboration, the disappointing bullfighting drama Fiesta (1947), mostly because On an Island With You allows Williams to do what she did best — look stunning in and out of the water, and perform some spectacular water ballet numbers. (I’ve also never seen Thorpe’s first film starring Williams, Thrill of a Romance (1945) … what kind of an Esther Williams fan am I?!?)
In On an Island With You, she’s again paired with Mexican heartthrob Ricardo Montalban — her co-star in Fiesta (1947) — and also with Peter Lawford, who comes off as a real drip compared to the dashing Montalban.
This is too bad, since the audience is supposed to be rooting for Lt. Lawrence Y. Kingslee (Lawford), who fell in love with movie star Rosalind Rennolds (Williams) when he was serving in the South Pacific in World War II. Rosalind was doing a USO tour to raise the boys’ morale, and doesn’t even remember meeting Lt. Kingslee. She had too many brief romantic dalliances during the war to remember one more than any of the others, but for him it was the single most important event of his life.
As is all too common in movies from the ’40s, his romantic brio is so excessive it borders on stalking. During a break in the filming of Rosalind’s latest picture, Lt. Kingslee flies her away to the island where they met against her will. The rub is that real islands aren’t like islands in the movies. There are leeches and sinkholes, and when they’re away from the plane the natives steal the wheels. On the plus side, he remembers where he buried all the cans of Spam around the old Quonset hut where he used to bunk.
There’s a metafictional element to On an Island With You, since the film Rosalind is making with her fiancé, Ricardo Montez (played by Ricardo Montalban), is also called “On an Island With You,” and in all the spectacular dance numbers there are at least a few shots of the cameramen filming the action to remind you that they’re making a movie.
While I thought Lawford was miscast, there’s plenty of entertainment to be had in On an Island With You. Besides Williams’s luminescent screen presence and big water ballet numbers, Ricardo Montalban has some wonderful dances with Cyd Charisse — all high points of the film — and Xavier Cugat and his Orchestra are on hand for some good musical numbers. I especially liked Cugat’s tiny chihuahua.
Jimmy Durante has a big role in On an Island With You, too. He might even have more screen time than Lawford. I like Durante, but he’s not exactly the first person I want to see when I sit down to watch a Technicolor musical that takes place in the South Pacific.
Sixty-four years ago there was a Democrat in the White House facing reelection in the fall, and there was no single heavily favored Republican candidate as the days marched on toward the Republican National Convention.
That Democrat was, of course, Harry S. Truman, and he had faced a bitter rebuke two years earlier when the Democratic Party lost 11 seats in the Senate and 54 seats in the House of Representatives in the 1946 midterm elections (a landslide for Republicans similar to the 2010 midterm elections). I’m tempted to keep drawing parallels to the present day, but I’m afraid that if I do it’ll devolve into me spewing a bunch of meaningless facts, like how the 1948 Summer Olympics were held in London, just like the 2012 Summer Olympics.
Suffice it to say that this was a good time for me to watch Frank Capra’s State of the Union for the first time. And if you’ve never seen it before, then it’s a good time for you to watch it, too.
Adolphe Menjou plays a brilliant Republican party strategist named Jim Conover, who works with the young but equally brilliant Kay Thorndyke (Angela Lansbury) to split the Republican primaries in order to get their own dark-horse candidate the nomination for the presidency. Kay is the ruthless publisher who owns the Thorndyke Press, which was bequeathed her by her equally ruthless father.
Van Johnson plays campaign manager “Spike” McManus, a devil-may-care sort who’s happy to tell anyone who will listen that they have no hope of unseating Truman. Instead of coasting on his million-dollar boyish charm, Johnson engages in some “acting” in State of the Union, which didn’t always work for me, but it didn’t ruin the picture either. (And we have to cut Van Johnson a little slack, since in State of the Union he’s acting opposite four absolutely brilliant film actors who are all at the top of their game.)
In response to the assertion that there’s no real difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, Conover exclaims, “There’s all the difference in the world. They’re in and we’re out!”
With this “win or die” attitude, Conover, Thorndyke, and McManus approach the plain-speaking Grant Matthews (Spencer Tracy) to be their candidate. Matthews is a wealthy and successful airplane designer who has a “hang the politicians” attitude and thumbs his nose at political divisiveness with statements like, “Either we all pull together or we’ll be pulled apart.”
On the other hand, he’s in the midst of a long-standing extramarital affair with Kay Thorndyke, and when he launches his campaign for the presidency, it’s the first time he’s seen his wife Mary (Katharine Hepburn) in four months.
I’m not sure why this film isn’t talked about as much as Capra’s earlier films, like It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Despite its cynical view of our two-party system, I think State of the Union is every bit as hopeful about humanity as Capra’s earlier films.
It’s also a very funny film, which I wasn’t expecting. Even when movies about politics are labeled “comedies” I usually find them more depressing than funny, but State of the Union features a cast of characters who are genuinely interesting and likable (and when they’re unlikable, it’s done in a natural and believable way). Capra’s direction is smooth and assured, with shot constructions that are occasionally brilliant, but there are a lot of jump cuts, too, as though Capra cared more about getting the right flow and combination of dialogue takes then setting up his shots seamlessly.
State of the Union is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse that ran on Broadway from 1945 to 1947. The dialogue in the play was changed slightly from week to week to reflect the current political reality, which is obviously not something that can be done once a film is completed and released into theaters.
It could be this “trapped in amber” quality that has led to State of the Union being relegated to second-tier status among Capra’s films. If that’s the case, I think that’s sad and short-sighted. Despite the fact that State of the Union is entirely about the 1948 election for president, its depiction of our two-party system, the personal and moral compromises a presidential candidate must make, and the corrupting influence of big money in politics is just as relevant today as it was 64 years ago.
If Mervyn LeRoy’s slick M-G-M romance Homecoming is to be believed, the entire European theater of operations in World War II was an elaborate backdrop for a passionate and illicit romance between Clark Gable and Lana Turner.
Gable plays a doctor named Ulysses Johnson. His friends call him “Lee,” but the beautiful nurse he befriends during the war calls him “Useless.” (That beautiful nurse is Lieutenant Jane McCall, nicknamed “Snapshot.” She’s played by Lana Turner, who was really good at playing beautiful women.)
Dr. Johnson is a noninterventionist who enlists to fight mostly because it’s “the thing to do.” Six year earlier this wasn’t our war, he says, and he doesn’t see how it’s any more our war now.
Lt. McCall tries to convince Dr. Johnson otherwise, which leads him to quip, “When women talk world politics it makes me laugh.”
McCall responds tartly, “Do the women of the bombed cities of Europe make you laugh, Major?”
Unsurprisingly, this sharp verbal exchange leads to more sharp verbal exchanges, most of them with a strong undercurrent of flirtatiousness.
Dr. Johnson has a wife back home, Penny (Anne Baxter), and McCall has a son to think about, but the more they try to keep things professional, the more the tension builds.
It should come as no surprise that Homecoming is more concerned with Dr. Johnson’s budding affair with Snapshot than it is with his moral and patriotic development. For instance, during the battle of Bastogne, the biggest trouble they face is having to abandon their jeep after it’s stuck in the mud. They have no difficulty locating an abandoned farmhouse in which to sexily and achingly hole up for the night. Try watching this movie immediately after watching the harrowing Band of Brothers episode “Bastogne” (Oct. 7, 2001). It will be really difficult to take Homecoming seriously.
Actually, Homecoming may be really difficult to take seriously even if you’ve never seen Band of Brothers and are totally unfamiliar with the history of World War II. But if all you’re looking for is a wartime romance starring a couple of members of Hollywood royalty, it fits the bill.
Fred Zinnemann’s The Search premiered in New York City on March 23, 1948, and went into wide release on March 26.
It wasn’t the first film the slim, haunted-looking heartthrob Montgomery Clift starred in, but since the release of Howard Hawks’s Red River, filmed in 1946, was delayed due to legal troubles until August 1948, The Search was the first film many moviegoers saw him in.
Clift doesn’t appear until more than 35 minutes into the picture. The first section of the film follows a group of emaciated, frightened children liberated from concentrations camps and then processed through U.N.R.R.A. (The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration).
U.N.R.R.A. is in place to help the children, but after years of living in a state of fear, they’re unable to trust adults wearing uniforms. These scenes involve a mixture of languages with no subtitles. The important details are conveyed with voiceover narration in the style of a documentary.
When the children are being transported in ambulances to a new location, one of the ambulances has a broken exhaust pipe. Gas leaks in, and the terrified children break through the glass in the rear doors and escape. Two of the kids, Karel (Ivan Jandl) and his French friend, successfully evade the U.N.R.R.A. soldiers but then are separated when the French boy crosses a river.
Before the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, Karel’s family — his parents and his sister — led the happy life of intellectuals, reading and playing music together. But now little Karel carries a tattoo on his left arm from Auschwitz while his mother (Jarmila Novotna) wanders desolate German highways, searching for her son. She lost her husband and daughter during the war, and she desperately clings to the belief that her son is still alive.
Much of the exterior footage in The Search was filmed in the American zone of West Berlin, and it has elements of the German “Trümmerfilm” (“rubble film”), a style of filmmaking that began with Wolfgang Staudte’s 1946 film Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us) and that used the desolated, bombed-out post-war landscape of Germany as a backdrop.
The emotional core of The Search is the relationship that develops between the nine-year-old Karel and American G.I. Ralph Stevenson (Clift). Slowly but patiently Stevenson gains Karel’s trust and helps him come out of his emotionally shellshocked state. Ironically, he tries to help Karel accept the fact that his mother is dead when she is in fact alive.
The Search is a beautifully made, emotional drama that’s fairly restrained. It would have been easy for director Zinnemann to be manipulative, but he trusts his actors. The character of Karel could have been a real disaster if an adorable Hollywood moppet had played him, but Ivan Jandl was really Czech, and he brings as much authenticity to his role as Clift does to his. Clift’s character also could have been a stereotype, but he’s completely believable as a typical young American.
The Search was nominated for four Academy Awards — best director for Fred Zinnemann, best actor for Montgomery Clift, and best story and best screenplay, both for Richard Schweizer and David Wechsler. Ivan Jandl was given a special award for outstanding juvenile performance.
Curtis Bernhardt’s High Wall stars Robert Taylor as that most venerable of film noir archetypes — the amnesiac combat veteran who may or may not have committed murder.
Bernhardt was one of many German filmmakers who fled the Third Reich to work in Hollywood, and whose dark artistic sensibilities helped create what we now know as “film noir.” So far I’ve seen two other films he made, the excellent melodrama My Reputation (1946), which starred Barbara Stanwyck and George Brent, and the equally excellent psychodrama Possessed (1947), which starred Joan Crawford and Van Heflin.
High Wall lets Bernhardt flex his suspense-thriller muscles a little, and he’s more than up to the task.
At first glance, High Wall looks and feels like any number of similar dramas from RKO Radio Pictures — tight, well-made, black and white flicks designed for the bottom of a double bill — but it was actually produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, a powerhouse of a studio that wasn’t usually in the “noir” business.
High Wall is a pretty lean thriller, but MGM production values are evident in a few scenes, particularly when the protagonist, Steven Kenet (Robert Taylor), is sent to Hamelin County Psychiatric Hospital. The sanitarium features a big cast of extras; there are legions of brusque, businesslike cops and hospital attendants, and dozens of hapless patients lolling around on beds in the open ward. If High Wall had been an on-the-cheap production for Monogram pictures, there probably would have been one night attendant, two other patients, and sets that looked like they were on loan from a theatrical production.
Most of High Wall is shot on sets, so the exteriors are pretty fake-looking, but not distractingly so. Shooting on a soundstage also allows Bernhardt and his cinematographer, Paul Vogel, to create a dramatic rain-swept finale full of rich textures that probably wouldn’t have been possible if they’d been shooting on location.
Also, with such a big cast of loonies, it’s more believable that Kenet has so much difficulty seeing his psychiatrist, Dr. Ann Lorrison (Audrey Totter).
Kenet, you see, looks like the most likely suspect for his wife’s murder. Her strangled corpse was sitting right next to him when he drove his car off a bridge in a daze, after all.
But after Kenet finally gets a few appointments with Dr. Lorrison, she starts to believe that he might be innocent. Lorrison is a no-nonsense salt-of-the-earth gal. (This is evident early in the film when she turns down a male doctor’s offer of a date at the opera because she has Red Sox tickets.)
It’s not just Kenet’s good looks, tragic aura, six-year-old son, and Distinguished Service Cross and Silver Star from World War II that attract Lorrison, it’s nagging evidence of his innocence, so she starts helping him escape from the asylum for periods of time so he can investigate upstanding citizen Willard Whitcombe (Herbert Marshall), a middle-aged man who works for Brattle Press Religious Educational Text Books.
Marshall is the perfect villain for this type of melodrama. His bearing is patrician — and his voice is one of the smoothest and most charming you’ll ever hear — but there’s clearly something very wrong with him.
For a good portion of High Wall, it’s possible to be in doubt of the outcome. Kenet looks guilty, even to the viewer, and he suffers from fainting spells. He has a subdural hematoma in the left lobe that’s causing forgetfulness, irritability, and a possible proclivity toward murder and suicide.
High Wall is a fun movie. When it comes to the question of Audrey Totter’s charm and sexiness, I was a little on the fence after Lady in the Lake (1947), but she’s utterly charming in High Wall, and much more natural in High Wall than in Lady in the Lake. (It’s possible that not requiring her to stare into the camera the whole time might have let her deliver a more natural performance.)
I also really like the preview for High Wall. Its claims are actually accurate, too. “So tense. So taut.” That’s true. High Wall is a well-crafted suspense thriller. Also, when the preview says “Robert Taylor — more exciting than in Undercurrent,” that’s an understatement. Undercurrent is really pretty bad, and High Wall is really pretty good:
Hey, kids, do you think “nostalgia” is only something for baby boomers hazily recalling Woodstock or Generation X’ers and their ’80s dance parties? Guess again.
Nostalgia has been around since there were people old enough to remember their youth and know that they’d never get it back. Charles Walters’s Good News, for instance, took viewers in 1947 and 1948 back to the good old days of 1927, when people were dancing the Charleston, when Will Rogers was elected mayor of Beverly Hills, when Coolidge chose not to run again, when “flaming youth” ran wild, and when a girl was a “flapper” and a boy was a “sheik.”
Unfortunately, Good News is about as convincing a portrait of the ’20s as Grease (1978) was of the ’50s.
It’s a sanitized Technicolor version of the racy original, which was based on the hit Broadway play that premiered in 1927.
In the special features section of the DVD I watched, there were a couple of scenes from the 1930 version of Good News, and in spite of their static camerawork and unimaginative black and white cinematography they were totally and completely electrifying.
Take a look at the scene below, in which Dorothy McNulty performs the song “Varsity Drag.” It’s an athletic, goofy, wild number, full of sexual innuendo and all kinds of good stuff that would be impossible to have on screen after the enforcement of the Hays Code (like the underwear shot at 3 minutes and 20 seconds).
Incidentally, Dorothy McNulty later changed her professional name to Penny Singleton and starred in the Blondie movies. She was also the voice of Jane Jetson on The Jetsons.
Anyway, the 1947 version of Good News just can’t hold a candle to that kind of wild vivacity. It doesn’t help that Peter Lawford, who stars as B.M.O.C. Tommy Marlowe, was cast more for his appeal as a heartthrob than his talent as a singer. He’s not terrible, but he looks uncomfortable throughout the proceedings, especially when he has to sing and dance at the same time.
His leading lady, June Allyson, who plays shrinking violet Connie Lane, is also a bit of a disappointment, but their funny duet, “The French Lesson,” is an amazing bit of fast-paced wordplay.
The most energetic and fun-to-watch performer in the film is Joan McCracken, who plays the man-hungry Babe Doolittle. Her performance of “Pass That Peace Pipe” is a highlight of the film.
A very young Mel Tormé also shows up for a couple of songs, “Lucky in Love” and “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” so Good News is worth seeing if you’re a fan of The Velvet Fog.
The song “Pass That Peace Pipe,” which was written by Ralph Blane, Hugh Martin, and Roger Edens, was nominated for an Academy Award for best original song, but lost out to “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” from Song of the South (1946).
Nineteen forty-seven was the year Mickey Rooney turned 27, and the star of the Andy Hardy series and family fare like National Velvet (1944) was looking to stretch his range as an actor and step into more grown-up roles.
Roy Rowland’s Killer McCoy is a remake of Richard Thorpe’s The Crowd Roars (1938), which starred Robert Taylor as a young pugilist named Tommy “Killer” McCoy who was caught between his no-good father and his gangland manager.
Hopefully there’ll be a second remake next year starring former child star Haley Joel Osment. Maybe they could even throw in a drug-related in-ring breakdown, à la Oliver “The Atomic Bull” McCall, or a tawdry and mysterious death, à la Arturo Gatti.
But I digress.
Killer McCoy isn’t a bad flick, and Mickey Rooney is pretty good in it, but it has the misfortune of being a boxing picture that was released right around the same time as Body and Soul, which is one of the best boxing pictures of all time.
If you’re a fan of knock-down, drag-out fights, Killer McCoy does offer more punches per foot of film than Body and Soul. On the other hand, if the number of punches thrown was the only measure of a boxing film, then Rocky III (1982) and Rocky IV (1985) would be superior to Rocky (1976) and Rocky II (1979), and we all know that ain’t the case.
Rooney is pretty convincing as a boxer. The filmmakers don’t try to shoot around how unbelievably tiny he is, so it makes sense that his character starts out fighting as a featherweight and moves up to lightweight. (Although I think in real life Rooney would probably have been more in the flyweight and bantamweight range.) The boxers he faces are mostly little guys, too, like Bob Steele, who plays a former lightweight champion named Sailor Graves.
The supporting cast is generally good. I love seeing diminutive cowboy actor Steele in anything, and the same goes for Brian Donlevy, who plays boxing manager and fight promoter Jim Caighn. And actor James Dunn is great as Tommy McCoy’s drunken father, a former vaudevillian who clings to the past.
The problem is not with the actors, but with the story, which never really allows its characters to become three-dimensional people. Caighn, the manager, is an especially egregious example. He has a double life as “Carrson,” a Wall Street tycoon who is far removed from the disreputable world of boxing. Caighn doesn’t want his daughter, Sheila Carrson (Ann Blyth), to know about his double life. This is all totally ludicrous, of course, and only exists to manufacture a stumbling block to Sheila’s romance with Tommy McCoy.
Killer McCoy is competently made and entertaining if you’re able tolerate Mickey Rooney, which a lot of people aren’t. Its boxing matches are well choreographed and action-packed. It’s no Body and Soul, but then again, what is?
Edward Buzzell’s Song of the Thin Man was a bittersweet viewing experience for me. I’ve been a huge fan of the Thin Man series since the first film, The Thin Man (1934), so it was a little sad to know that Song of the Thin Man would be the last new film I’d see with William Powell and Myrna Loy as everyone’s favorite dipsomaniacal mystery-solving married couple, Nick and Nora Charles.
While some films in the Thin Man series are better than others, all of them are funny, well-made mysteries featuring two of the most appealing actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age.
As always, their little dog Asta is around for yuks, along with a brand new adorable little son, played by Dean Stockwell. (Yes, kids, Dean Stockwell was adorable once.)
But not to worry. Having a young son doesn’t stop Nick and Nora from continuing to booze it up and skulk around at night with flashlights, looking for clues.
The mystery they’re trying to solve this time around is the murder of a jazz band leader named Tommy Drake (Phillip Reed), who is shot aboard the S.S. Fortune, a gambling ship run by a man named Phil Brant (Bruce Cowling).
True to its title, Song of the Thin Man is all about music. Specifically jazz music, and the wacky nightclub performers who jam till dawn, like Drake’s former bandleader Buddy Hollis (Don Taylor) and his famous clarinet. Hollis is a talented musician, but he’s all whacked out from carrying a torch for the hot little cookie Fran Ledue Page (Gloria Grahame), a singer.
Keenan Wynn is also on hand as musician Clarence “Clinker” Krause, and he proves that his incredibly annoying character in The Hucksters (1947) wasn’t a case of lightning striking once.
The mystery in Song of the Thin Man isn’t that clever or involving. But as always with the Thin Man movies, the mystery and its solution is less important than all the fun Nick and Nora have carousing their way through it.
Powell and Loy were 41 years old and 28 years old, respectively, when the series began, so by the time they made Song of the Thin Man together they were starting to get on in years, but Loy looks just as beautiful as she did in 1934, and I don’t think anyone ever went to see the Thin Man movies for Powell’s looks.
All good things must come to an end, but I wish there could have been just a few more Thin Man movies with Powell and Loy.
It’s hard to watch Jack Conway’s The Hucksters today and not compare it with Mad Men.
While Mad Men is a TV series that began in 2007 and takes place in the early ’60s and The Hucksters takes place during the time it was filmed (the post-war ’40s), they share a number of similarities, and not just because they’re both about advertising agencies.
Both feature at their center a dashing leading man with rugged good looks as an advertising genius who must navigate the tricky waters of love, sex, and difficult clients. Jon Hamm was in his mid-30s when Mad Men began, while Clark Gable was in his mid-40s in 1947, but both of their characters are veterans of the most recent war and inveterate seducers of women.
The Hucksters is based on Frederic Wakeman’s 1946 novel of the same name, which spent a year at the top of the best-seller lists. Wakeman’s novel was based on a four-part exposé in The Saturday Evening Post, “The Star Spangled Octopus,” about talent and promotional agency MCA.
The novel’s racy subject matter was largely responsible for its success. Life magazine called it “Last year’s best-selling travesty on bigtime advertising.”
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer paid nearly $200,000 for the rights to Wakeman’s novel in a pre-publication deal. Most of the salacious details, however, never made it into the final shooting script. (Clark Gable’s take on the first draft of the script was, “It’s filthy and it isn’t entertainment.”) For instance, in the novel, Gable’s character, Victor Albee Norman, has an affair with a married woman, but she was changed into a war widow for the film.
Consequently, The Hucksters never quite achieves the satirical bite of Mad Men, but there are number of bits that are funny, particularly if you’re familiar with radio advertising circa 1947.
There are plenty of reasons to see The Hucksters. It was the American film debut of Deborah Kerr, who plays Gable’s widowed love interest, Kay Dorrance, and it also features the beautiful Ava Gardner as a torch singer named Jean Ogilvie. Adolphe Menjou is wonderful as Mr. Kimberly, the head of the advertising agency, and Keenan Wynn is appropriately irritating as a third-rate radio comedian named Buddy Hare.
The most memorable actor in the film, however, is Sydney Greenstreet, who plays Evan Llewellyn Evans, the grotesque and demanding head of Beautee Soap. After Gable’s character, Victor Norman, rejects the more scandalous layout favored by Evans, Evans sits down at the head of the boardroom table, tilts his head back, hawks, and spits on the table. “Mr. Norman, you’ve just seen me do a disgusting thing,” he says. “But you’ll always remember what I just did. You see, Mr. Norman, if nobody remembers your brand, you aren’t gonna sell any soap.”
The Hucksters could have used more moments like that. It’s nearly two hours long, and Gable’s romance with Kerr takes up much of the running time. It’s perfectly well-handled and shot, but it’s a storyline one could see in any number of pictures, while the advertising angle of the story is unique, and the film could have gotten more mileage out of it.
The Hucksters earned a respectable $4.4 million during its domestic release, but was a complete flop overseas, since in those days no one outside the United States was in any way familiar with American advertising or commercial broadcasting.
When I sat down to watch Fiesta, those words in the credits floored me. I can’t conceive of what it was like to grow up in a world without Ricardo Montalban. His suave, white-suit-wearing Mr. Roarke, from Fantasy Island (1977-1984), is a mysterious character who was burned into my mind at a young age. Ditto for his insane and weirdly brilliant role as the villain of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). Or his dapper and hilarious bad guy, Vincent Ludwig, in The Naked Gun (1988). Or his work as the pitchman for Maxwell House Decaf.
Maybe it was just the movies and TV shows that I watched, but Montalban seemed ubiquitous.
By the ’80s, he always appeared to be having fun with his “Latin lover” image, but he was never parodying himself. His smooth charm was undeniable, no matter what kind of ridiculous lines were coming out of his mouth. (Like claiming that decaffeinated coffee was “good to the last drop.”)
Richard Thorpe’s Fiesta wasn’t the first film to star Montalban. He’d already appeared in more than a dozen films in his native Mexico. But it was his first Hollywood film, and it was his introduction to American audiences. It was also an opportunity for Esther Williams to perform in a dramatic role that was very different from the roles that had made her famous in MGM’s “aquatic musicals.”
Williams and Montalban play twins, Maria and Mario Morales. Their father, Antonio Morales (Fortunio Bonanova), a former matador, always wanted a son to carry on his work in the ring. After confirming that he is indeed not going to have just a daughter, but rather twins, Morales proclaims his son “The future greatest matador in the whole world!”
Of course, things don’t work out the way Señor Morales expects. His son Mario is a gifted musician and composer who would much rather make music than wear the traje de luces (“suit of lights”) and fight bulls (even though he’s good at it). His daughter Maria, of course, is the one with the real desire to be a torero, but her gender makes such a thing unthinkable.
Mario is torn between his father’s plans for him and the interest that conductor Maximino Contreras (Hugo Haas) shows in his music. Eventually, Mario flees the ring when he finds out his father lied to him about a visit Señor Contreras made to their house. He does so out of anger, but his action is viewed as cowardice by the spectators. Naturally, Maria comes up with a plan to don the traje de luces and impersonate her brother in the ring.
Fiesta has the kind of shopworn plot and lifeless dialogue that one can suffer through if they’re merely the framework for a musical packed with great songs and exciting dance numbers. But while Fiesta is often classified as a musical, it’s not a really a musical. It’s a turgid, woodenly acted drama whose only high points are a handful of dance sequences.
If you like dancing, then Montalban’s numbers with Cyd Charisse (playing a character named Conchita) are worth seeing. (I especially liked the number they stomped out to “La Bamba,” the traditional Mexican song that Ritchie Valens later made famous.) The scene in which Mario hears one of his compositions played on the radio by Señor Contreras’s orchestra and listens in rapture before sitting down at the piano in the cantina to play along would be at home in a musical, but it’s an organic moment. There are no scenes in Fiesta in which the characters just break into song.
In short, it’s pretty lifeless, especially when compared with other Technicolor extravaganzas from MGM. Most of the cast isn’t very interesting to watch. The great silent star Mary Astor is wasted in a thankless role as Señora Morales. Montalban is enjoyable to watch, but Williams is terribly miscast. It’s not that she doesn’t look “Mexican” (you can see plenty of women who look like Esther Williams if you watch Spanish-language television). It’s that she looks nothing like Montalban, yet the audience is asked to believe that she is a convincing double for him when she dons the traje de luces and enters the ring. Her own stunt double is also a completely unconvincing facsimile of Williams during the bullfighting sequences. His muscular buttocks, lack of breasts, crotch bulge, muscular neck, and big ears are pretty difficult to confuse with Williams’s slightly different attributes.
I like Esther Williams a lot. She’s beautiful and appealing, not to mention a hell of a swimmer. But this was just the wrong role for her. Also, her “romantic” scenes with Jose “Pepe” Ortega (John Carroll) are dead on arrival.
Although the film begins with a statement of sincere thanks to the Mexican people, the production was a troubled one. The cinematographer, Sidney Wagner, and another crew member both died of cholera after eating contaminated street food. Esther Williams’s husband, Ben Gage, and makeup artist George Lane were both expelled from Mexico after a fight with a hotel employee. And a stuntman died of an infection he contracted after being gored in the groin by a bull.
The largest problem the production ran into had to do with bullfighting, which director Thorpe chose to depict in a sanitized fashion. For example, the first time we see Mario’s moves in the ring, he skirmishes with an uninjured bull who charges at him over and over as he dances around the ring and flourishes his cape, avoiding several near misses. Eventually the bull gets too tired to continue, and the fight is over.
During the bullfights in Fiesta, only the bullfighter’s life seems to be in danger. It is presented as a dangerous sport. In reality, the outcome of a bullfight is rarely in question, and it is less a sport than an artistic, ritualized slaughter in which the torero is judged according to his grace and style, not whether or not he kills the bull. (According to this article, which was published last year in The Guardian, only 52 matadors have been killed in the ring since the year 1700. There are myriad injuries, of course, which range from minor to spectacular. If you have a strong stomach, click here.) In Fiesta there are no banderilleros jamming spikes into the bull’s back, bleeding it out and tiring it. There is no taunting of the bull or clownish antics on the part of the other toreadors in the ring, like grabbing the bull’s tail and skiing through the dirt as the bull circles. And, most important of all, there is no killing of the bull with a single sword thrust — the estocada.
Bullfighting is inextricable from the national identity of most Spanish-speaking countries. The people of Mexico were already angry that their own toreadors could not star in the film, so the depiction of bullfighting as a bloodless spectacle added insult to injury. When Thorpe had finished shooting Fiesta, his unit manager Walter Strohm convinced him that the bulls used in the film should all be killed to assuage the anger of the Mexican people. Thorpe acquiesced, even though the bulls had cost $1,000 each, which is nearly $10,000 in today’s dollars.
On an Island With You was director Richard Thorpe’s fourth film to star the shimmering sea creature Esther Williams.
