by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Recently Charles and I ran an intriguing movie from the
TCM backlog I’d long been curious about: Fiesta, a 1947 MGM musical produced by Jack Cummings (who of the major MGM
musical producers at the time probably has the least stellar reputation —
Arthur Freed made MGM’s most stylish musicals and did most of Fred Astaire’s
and Gene Kelly’s films there; Joseph Pasternack’s movies were famous for
launching formidable singing stars like Deanna Durbin, Jane Powell, Kathryn
Grayson and Mario Lanza and for taking place in so barely recognizable a
simulacrum of reality that former MGM studio head Dore Schary called it the
“Land of Pasternacky”), directed by hack Richard Thorpe (who put the entire
cast one degree of separation from Elvis Presley, whom Thorpe directed in Jailhouse
Rock) from a screenplay by George Bruce and
future Hollywood 10 blacklistee Lester Cole. Though not as much a gender-bender
as one might guess from the central premise — Maria Morales (Esther Williams,
who goes for a brief dip in a lake early on but mostly stays out of the water
and doesn’t get one of those incredible aquatic ballet sequences by John Murray
Anderson or Busby Berkeley that marked her most entertaining films), fraternal
twin sister of Mario Morales (Ricardo Montalban in his first American film,
thereby earning him an “Introducing … ” card in the credits), takes over for
him in the bull ring with nobody, especially their father, retired matador Antonio Morales (Fortunio Bonanova), the wiser — Fiesta is a fun movie whose sheer dorkiness and
unwillingness to rise to some of the implications of its plot actually adds to
its charm.
The film begins in the 1920’s, when Antonio’s wife (Mary Astor)
gives birth to little Maria and, 15 minutes later, little Mario, and it works
its way up through their childhoods. Antonio is naturally eager to train Mario
for the corrida del toros so he
can take over and become the star Antonio had been until an unexpected goring
ended his career. With his sidekick, Chato Vasquez (Akim Tamiroff, surprisingly
restrained — for him — and even charming in a comic-relief role), playing the
bull (using two horns mounted on a crossbar, a standard technique for giving
budding bullfighters an opportunity to practice safely). Mario trains — and
Maria, a tomboy, watches, learns and ultimately gets better at it than their
brother. All Mario is interested in is playing — and, eventually, writing —
music, and eventually when he grows up to be Ricardo Montalban he composes a
“Fantasia Mexicana” that is actually Aaron Copland’s marvelously rambunctious El
Salón México tamed in an “arrangement” by
Johnny Green (I couldn’t resist, at one point during the movie, referring to
him by what his name would be in Spanish: Juanito Verde) that includes a part
for piano solo and turns the piece into a miniature concerto. When I saw the
Copland piece listed in the credits and saw that Johnny Green had been credited
with arranging it I was hoping it would be used for a spectacular production
number on the order of Gershwin’s An American in Paris in the famous film made 14 years later — also a
pre-existing light-classical piece by an American composer which Green
reassembled and conducted (stunningly) for a big production number — but my
hopes were eventually dashed.
The way the plot plays out is, as Charles pointed
out, yet another reworking of The Jazz Singer — dad wants son to follow in his footsteps but son
has other ideas; Maria sneaks a copy of her brother’s piece to the great
Mexican conductor Maximino Contreras (Hugo Haas), who agrees to premiere it and
get Mario a scholarship to study music for two years. Only when he comes to the
Morales manse to give Mario the
good news, Antonio intercepts him, promising to let Mario know the next day
that the great conductor came to see him. Of course, Antonio does no such
thing, and instead prepares Mario for his debut as a professional bullfighter in
Tlaxcala — but on the day of the fight Contreras shows up at the bull ring and
pleads with Mario not to put his life, and his great musical talent, at risk of
annihilation in the bullring. So just before he’s supposed to fight the bull,
Mario wimps out and both he and his dad become national laughingstocks. But
instead of going off with Contreras, Mario rejects both his real and substitute fathers’ plans for his
destiny, runs away and takes a series of menial jobs. While on a bus taking him
from one of those jobs to another, he meets a character identified only as “The
Tourist” (Alan Napier), who tries to discuss music with him but is rebuffed —
one does get the impression that
Napier is taking a vacation from his regular job as Bruce Wayne’s butler even though
the Batman TV series was 19 years
in the future — until the bus passengers are in a cantina having lunch and Mario hears the broadcast of the
Mexican symphony playing his piece, and immediately sits down at the bar piano
and improvises a piano part. Though according to imdb.com André Previn was the
actual pianist on the soundtrack, Ricardo Montalban was a good enough pianist
to synchronize with him impeccably and create the illusion he was playing
himself.
While all this is going on, Maria hatches a plan to flush her brother
out of hiding by disguising herself as him and going into the bullring herself,
winning rave reviews for her first fight at Tlaxcala and getting a contract to
fight at Puebla (where MGM actually went to shoot the film — at least the
Mexican exteriors — though imdb.com is silent over whether they did the studio
work at a Mexican facility like Churubusco or back home in Culver City — and
where, according to Esther Williams’ autobiography, her then-husband Ben Gage
got in a bar fight and nearly got the entire company thrown out of the country:
shades of Lee Tracy literally
pissing away his career during the shoot of ¡Viva Villa! 13 years before — standing on his hotel balcony, he
urinated on a company of Mexican soldiers marching by and the Mexican
government responded by throwing not only him but the entire company out of the
country, and MGM fired not only Tracy but director Howard Hawks). Only all the
other characters, including Mario, converge on Puebla for the big fight and
Maria, seeing her brother, loses her concentration, the bull comes after her (a
running theme in the Bruce-Cole script holds that bullfighters only get gored
when they lose their concentration and take their eyes off the bull) and Mario
himself has to get the bull off his sister, using his suit jacket as a cape.
The movie ends with both brother and sister appropriately paired off with other
opposite-sex cast members — Mario with his dancing partner Conchita (Cyd
Charisse) and Maria with José “Pepe” Ortega, a scientist who’s about to take a
job with the Institute of Research in New York City (a name that reminded us of
all those mad-scientist movies with Lionel Atwill like Doctor X and The Mad Doctor of Market Street — for the rest of the movie Charles and I even took
turns saying the word “scal-PEL,” with that odd accent on the last syllable
Atwill used in Doctor X) — and
Antonio happy even though both
his kids are forsaking the bullring permanently.
Fiesta is a fun movie, with glorious three-strip
Technicolor photography of Mexico (though, oddly, the bullfights themselves are
dirtier than the rest — stock footage with Eastmancolor? — and the stunt
doubling of both Williams and
Montalban in the big fights, probably by the same person, is all too obvious;
Eddie Cantor’s film The Kid from Spain is actually more convincing, mainly because Sidney Franklin, an
American who had gone to Mexico to learn to be a torero, was not only his stunt double but also his coach,
and while Cantor was clearly doubled in the long shots he was game enough to
shoot a few close-ups with the bull in the same frame) and a plot that plays
with gender roles even though the play remains pretty unserious (just think of
what Preston Sturges could have done with this premise and this cast!), and
it’s also a fertile field for degrees of separation: Charles reminded me that
Montalban’s presence puts Esther Williams one degree of separation from William
Shatner (Montalban was in the original Star Trek episode “Space Seed” and the second Star
Trek movie, The Wrath of Khan, which was actually a sequel to “Space Seed”), while
Fortunio Bonanova puts the cast of Fiesta one degree of separation from Orson Welles (as, come to think of it,
does Alan Napier, the “Holy Father” in Welles’ Macbeth), since Bonanova played Susan Alexander’s hapless,
overwhelmed voice teacher in Citizen Kane. Indeed, it’s especially ironic that Bonanova plays a character trying
to keep his son from having a
musical career, since he studied voice as a baritone and intended to make his
career in opera before he settled on acting and his most famous role in a film is as a voice
teacher.
As far as the musical program of Fiesta is concerned, aside from the Copland/Green/Previn
piece, virtually all the songs are traditional Mexican stuff — when Montalban
played the opening strain of the Copland I briefly mistook it for “La Paloma”
and joked that there was an edict that song had to appear in every Hollywood movie about Mexico; actually “La Paloma” isn’t heard in this movie but the “Mexican Hat Dance” is
(with some weirdly unauthentic trombone slides) and so is “La Bamba,” sung by a
group called Los Bocheros in much the same style as Los Lobos performed it in
“traditional” guise in the Ritchie Valens biopic La Bamba (and that film’s director, Luis Valdez —who turned
in a work of quality and power instead of the hack job that was The
Buddy Holly Story — marvelously had the
song heard both ways, a traditional Mexican version and Valens’ rock ’n’ roll version, both played by Los
Lobos), and while it isn’t particularly exciting music it is enjoyable, and it’s fun to see Montalban (who hadn’t
sung or danced professionally before, though he’d made films in Mexico as a
straight actor) almost holding
his own with Cyd Charisse in their joint dance numbers. Ricardo Montalban’s
career was launched with a major “push” from MGM but fell victim to Hollywood’s
ironclad rules about how to use actors of color (though the much less
prestigious Universal broke those rules in casting Turhan Bey), and he also
suffered indirectly from the Hollywood blacklist; though he wasn’t blacklisted
himself, John Howard Lawson was,
and that put an end to the projects Lawson had been pushing for Montalban:
biopics of Simón Bolivár and Emiliano Zapata!
