Carnival in Costa Rica (20th Century-Fox, 1947)

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

After Dirty Little Secret my husband Chrles and I ran a grey-label DVD of a 1947 20th Century-Fox musical called Carnival in Costa Rica. Fox’s cycle of musicals set in Latin American countries had begun with Down Argentine Way in 1940 and advanced through such titles as That Night in Rio and Weekend in Havana from 1941. Fox was actually asked to make these movies by the federal government, which wanted to pursue what they called the Good Neighbor Policy to reassure Latin American countries and their leaders that the United States nad their best interests at heart. The real motive behind the Good Neighbor Policy was to ensure that Latin American countries either would outright join the international alliance against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan or, at the very least, would stay neutral and sell precious metals and other natural resources only to Allied, not Axis, countries. Unfortunately for this movie, by 1947 World War II had already been over for two years and the plot devices, already no great shakes, were becoming really threadbare.

The main reason I was interested in Carnival in Costa Rica was that the Cuban composer and bandleader Ernesto Lecuona was hired to do the music for it, and the sequence in which he appears, clowning around at the piano while leading his band (who were actually called “Lecuona’s Cuban Boys”), including a trumpet player taking a frantic double-timed solo. Is quite frankly the best and most entertaining scene in the film. The rest of it is a pretty dreary romantic quadrilateral in which the families of Pepe Castro (Cesar Romero) and Luisa Molina (Vera-Ellen) have arranged for the two to get married even though they barely know each other and haven’t seen each other since well before puberty. Alas, Pepe has returned to his home in Costa Rica after an extended sojourn in the U.S. with a fiancée in tow, Celeste (Celeste Holm, which means she probably didn’t have any trouble remembering her character name), while Luisa meets and falls in love with an American stranded in Costa Rica, Jeff Stephens (Dick Haymes, top-billed in one of Fox’s attempts to build him up into a movie heartthrob much the way Paramount had with Bing Crosby in the 1930’s and RKO and MGM did with Frank Sinatra in the 1940’s).

At first I had written that Romero was the only bona fide Latin-American among the four principals, but I had forgotten that Dick Haymes was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina even though his father was English and his mother was Irish – which caused him many complications in his later career when he continually had to get his green card renewed. Carnival in Costa Rica is the sort of mediocre movie that rips off great ones; the screenwriters included Samuel Hoffenstein, who in 1932 worked on the film I consider to be the greatest musical ever made, Rouben Mamoulian’s stunning Love Me Tonight, and though he had two collaborators both on Love Me Tonight (George Marion and Waldemar Young) and here (John Larkin and Elizabeth Reinhardt), I suspect he’s responsible for the remarkable scene (a self-plagiarism from Love Me Tonight) in which the heroine is inspired by a dream to go after the man she really loves. Also, Jeff Stephens and Pepe Castro turn out to be good friends, which couldn’t help but remind me of the first Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie, Flying Down to Rio, another one in which a Latin American heroine (Dolores Del Rio) is torn between an American lover (Gene Raymond) and the fellow Latin her family expects her to marry (Raul Roulien).

Most of the movie is taken up with rather leaden ensemble dances supposedly depicting the titular carnivals (plural) in Costa Rica, represented by dances executed on Hollywood soundstages combined with second-unit backgrounds presumably shot in Costa Rica – though how they moved the big, bulky three-strip Technicolor cameras down there is a mystery to me. Though the celebrated choreographer Léonide Massine worked on at least one of the numbers, the dances are surprisingly dull and it seems like 20th Century-Fox and director Gregory Ratoff (here without the aid of an illustrious collaborator the way he had Orson Welles on Black Magic) were relying on the neon-bright colors of three-strip Technicolor for their entertainment value. On the plus side is Pat Friday, voice double for Vera-Ellen (who was an amazing dancer but couldn’t sing), whose voice matches Vera-Ellen’s dialogue surprisingly well – better than she had Lynn Bari’s in the films Sun Valley Serenade and Orchestra Wives, in which Bari (with Friday’s voice) played Glenn Miller’s band singer. Carnival in Costa Rica is worth watching mainly for Lecuona’s songs (mostly with Harry Ruby supplying English-language lyrics), not only the ones he wrote for the film but his two biggest nits, “Malagueña” and “Andalucia” (also known as “The Breeze and I”) which he had written as part of a solo piano suite about Spain and here make brief appearances in the background score. Otherwise it’s the sort of movie that I’m glad I saw once but can’t imagine wanting to watch it again.