Rio (Universal, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At about 9:20 last night I ran my husband Charles an intriguing movie I’d never seen before or even heard of until I ran across it in a post on YouTube: Rio, a Universal film from 1939 directed by John Brahm (a sporadically interesting German expatriate with a flair for Gothic imagery even though at times he seems like the sort of director who got offered the scripts Fritz Lang turned down) from a committee-wrltten script. Future director Jean Negulesco is credited with the original story, but four other writers – Aben Kandel, Edwin Justus Mayer, Frank Partos and Stephen Morehouse Avery – got credit for the actual screenplay. Rio is an oddball movie that stars Basil Rathbone as Parisian financier Paul Reynard, who as the film opens is about to celebrate his one-year anniversary. His bride is former nightclub chanteuse Irene Reynard (Sigrid Gurie, who had been given a huge star buildup by Sam Goldwyn, who cast her in The Adventures of Marco Polo opposite Gary Cooper, only her chance for a major career dried up almost immediately when it turned out that, contrary to Goldwyn’s publicists who claimed she was an immigrant from Norway, her parents were Norwegian immigrants but she herself had been born in Flatbush, Brooklyn), who seems happy enough in the marriage but is scared of the enraged looks she sometimes gets from her husband whenever he’s suffered a business reversal.

When the film opens he’s desperate for a loan: he tries to get one from a bankers’ syndicate in Paris. When they turn him down he flies out to London but is turned down there, too, so he makes another run at the Paris bankers and this time he tells them – honestly – that most of the securities he’s deposited with them are worthless forgeries. He thinks this is going to lead them to bail him out on the ground that if it became publicly known that the banks he’s trying to borrow from were stocked with fraudulent securities, they would collapse, so he figures he has them over the proverbial shoals and they will have to bail him out in order to keep from going under themselves. Instead they swear out a complaint against him and the police arrest him as a swindler in the most embarrassing venue conceivable: at the one-year anniversary party he’s throwing for his wife at the club where she used to work, and where she’s recognized and asked to sing one of her old songs. Until this point I’d assumed that the writers wanted us to think of Rathbone’s character as a lovable rogue we’d be rooting for, but when he is found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in an island penal colony off the coast of South America, it’s clear we’re supposed to read him as a full-fledged villain.

His wife gives away the valuable jewelry he’d given her on their anniversary night, saying she doesn’t want his “tainted money,” and she and his faithful servant and best friend Dirk (Victor McLaglen, second-billed, behind Rathbone but ahead of Gurie) move to Rio de Janeiro (well, it had to figure in the plot somewhere!), where she gets a job at the “Club Samba” croaking out old songs (actually written by Frank Skinner, music, and Ralph Freed, words, though the first song Gurie sang back in Paris, “Love Opened My Eyes,” was by Jimmy McHugh, lyrics as well as music). Skinner and Freed also penned a song for the Rio Carnival, “Sí, Sí, Sí,” which is sung by Samba Club manager Roberto (Leo Carrillo) and his assistant Manuelo (Billy Gilbert, suggesting that one tag line that could have been used to advertise this film was “Billy Gilbert Sings!”). For the next few reels the film alternates between Paul Reynard;s ordeal serving his sentence on Devil’s Island (it’s never explicitly referred to as that in the film – maybe Universal was tired of having the sort of kerfuffle Warner Bros. had had with the French government when they made Devil’s Island in 1939, a “B” knockoff of John Ford’s great film The Prisoner of Shark Island in which Boris Karloff plays a doctor unjustly convicted of a crime and sentenced to Devil’s Island until his medical skills become indispensable as the island is beset by an epidemic; ironically once France fell to the Nazis in 1940 Warners reissued this film and adveertised it as, “Now the Truth Can Be Told!”) and his wife’s career singing at the Samba Club, fending off the advances of the club’s owner and redeeming a barfly who gets on her bad side by literally blowing a pile of matches in her face.

The man is Bill Gregory (an almost unrecognizable Robert Cummings), and it turns out he’s a disgraced engineer who designed a bridge that collapsed shortly after it was opened. Gregory insists that the bridge’s design was sound and the collapse was due to an unscrupulous contractor who short-changed the project by using cheaper building materials than the ones he had specified (so one of the two men in Irene Reynard’s life is a swindler and the other is a victim of swindlers). He gets dragged into an alcoholic stupor and then gets dragged out of it again when the local authorities have to ration the city’s water supply quite severely. Gregory finds out that the cause of the shortage is a malfunctioning irrigation system, and he says that though he can do a short-term fix of the city’s pump, long-term the only real solution is to build a dam. (It’s a measure of how short Universal’s budget was on this film that while we hear a lot of talk about the dam, we never actually get to see it – not even a model.) When the dam is completed (preposterously quickly) there’s a bizarre scene at the local church where the dam is officially blessed by the local priest, with both Gregory and Irene in attendance. Naturally their proximity has ripened into love, and the two appear altar-bound after Paul Reynard’s escape attempt seemingly ends with him turning up dead in the swamp that surrounds the prison and is the last line of defense after jungle growth and a flock of killer ants.

Unfortunately, Reynard isn’t dead: he planted his ID bracelet on his fellow convict who was supposed to break out with him but had succumbed to the killer ants (and Paul helped him along by stabbing him), and he and faithful servant Dirk takes him to safety in a boat and then go to the Samba Club to get Irene to see the error of her ways and demand her back. Unfortunately for Paul, however, the Rio police have got wind that he’s headed there and they are ready to shoot down both him and Dirk (though, once again, this presumed dramatic action highlight is never shown on screen, though that might have been an artistic decision similar to the ending shoot-out of The Big Sleep seven years later) – while Irene and the reformed Gregory are able to pair off together at last. Rio is a truly unusual movie, a weird sort of genre-bender which cuts back and forth from the Samba Club to Paul’s ordeal on the Penal Colony Which Dares Not Speak Its Name. The Devil’s Island scenes led Charles jokingly to call it “Papillon – The Musical,” and Larry Ceballos (third in line for the choreography jobs at Warner Bros. after Busby Berkeley and Bobby Connolly were unavailable) is credited for choreographing the Rio Carnival sequence (built up with a lot of stock footage of the real Rio Carnival). It’s saved by the power and authority of Rathbone’s acting (everyone else in the movie is either all-good, all-bad or comic relief, and I found myself wondering whether Sigrid Gurie’s part may have originally been written for Marlene Dietrich, who would have been a lot better at portraying the character’s world-weariness; she also could have done her own singing, while Gurie’s singing voice was so much lower in pitch than her speaking voice I suspected she had a voice double even though I wasn’t sure) and by the stunning atmospherics of director John Brahm.

I long wrote off Brahm as a poor man’s (or a poor producer’s) Fritz Lang, and I suspect much of my distaste for Brahm came from having watched his 1939 movie Let Us Live, a shameless ripoff of Lang’s 1937 masterpiece You Only Live Once with the same male star, Henry Fonda, playing the same part – a young convict who’s trying to go straight – and defaced with a happy ending instead of Lang’s tragic one. I’ve seen more of Brahm’s films since then, including the three in one of the Fox Horror boxes I liked (The Undying Monster, The Lodger – the 1944 20th Century-Fox remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s star-making 1926 silent – and Hangover Square); the movies were packaged together in what wasn’t billed as a tribute to Brahm but could have been since he made all three. Aided by magnificent chiaroscuro cinematography by Hal Mohr, Brahm makes Rio a real treat for the eyes that qualifies as film noir at least visually, if not thematically (had the writing committee made Basil Rathbone’s character more emotionally complex and morally ambiguous Rio would have qualified as noir thematically as well as visually). It’s a film that runs all over the map both in terms of critical reception in 1939 and in the seven imdb.com reviews today, which run the gamut from “Don’t waste your time” to “A little gem.” I quite liked Rio even though it was all too obviously another entry in that odd cycle of movies with titles from the Third World cities in which they took place (a trail blazed by producer Walter Wanger when he bought the remake rights to 1937’s French film Pépé le Moko and retitled it Algiers, though eight years earlier Josef von Sternberg had arguably made the template for these exotica movies, Morocco) and of which the most famous one to date is obviously Casablanca.