by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was yet another 20th Century-Fox musical
from the Alice Faye boxed set, That Night in Rio, which also starred Don Ameche (who named it his favorite of his own
films — which surprised me; I thought it would have been The Story of
Alexander Graham Bell, a film that was such
a hit that for a while “ameche” entered the language as a slang term for
“telephone”) and Carmen Miranda (in her second U.S. film and her first actually
made in Hollywood). It was also a followup to Down Argentine Way — in which Faye had had to give up the lead to Betty
Grable (the film made Grable an instant star after over a decade during which
she’d hung around Hollywood desperately hoping for a big break) — in the
sequence of musicals set in South America which Fox, RKO and Disney made to
help boost President Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” to help our neighbors on
the rest of the American continents (and, not incidentally, to keep them
aligned with us if and when we got into World War II because many of the South
American countries had important resources for maintaining military machines
the Axis powers would dearly have loved to get their hands on to keep their war effort going, and FDR was anxious to keep those
resources out of enemy hands and, if at all possible, get them for us instead).
That Night in Rio would be followed
by Weekend in Havana (a film I
wish the Faye boxed set had included instead of yet another pressing of The
Gang’s All Here, which I bought on its own
as well as part of the Miranda box), in which, instead of Grable replacing Faye
as in Down Argentine Way, Faye
replaced Grable. Carmen Miranda was in all three, though at least in this one
she got to play her genuine white-Brazilian nationality (she was actually born
in Portugal but her family emigrated to Brazil when she was three) even though
the songs she sang were pretty silly novelties like “Chica-Chica-Boom-Chic,”
“I-Yi-Yi-I Like You Very Much” and “Cai Cai” — the first two by Harry Warren
and Mack Gordon, the film’s overall songwriters, and the third an actual
Brazilian song by Roberto Martins and Pedro Barrios with an English lyric by
John Latouche. (When Miranda, flush with her U.S. successes with Streets
of Paris on the Broadway stage and Down
Argentine Way on film, returned in what she
thought would be triumph to the stage of the Urca Casino in Rio and sang her
big U.S. hit “South American Way,” she was booed by the Brazilians, who saw the
song as a putrid U.S. knockoff of their national music.) The 1990’s documentary
on Miranda, Bananas Is My Business,
showed how Miranda saw her work in the U.S. as a kind of cultural emissary to
build understanding of Latin American culture, and to that end she had a
stipulation in her Fox contract that she would sing at least one song in
Portuguese in each film (here she actually did three, though many of them were
just portions of big numbers in which another performer or two were brought on
to sing the same song in English). The documentary also noted that the way
Carmen Miranda’s characters spoke — alternately in broken-English and
rapid-fire Portuguese the way Lupe Velez played the “Mexican Spitfire” largely
in rapid-fire Spanish — was the way she had spoken when she first arrived in
the U.S.; she eventually learned to speak English perfectly but, like Jack
Benny’s violin playing, Carmen Miranda couldn’t speak perfect English in public
without blowing her carefully cultivated image.
Here she’s cast as a character
named “Carmen,” co-star and girlfriend of U.S. nightclub performer Larry Martin
(Don Ameche), who holds forth in a Rio nightclub and whose act consists of,
among other things, an impersonation of one of Rio’s richest men, the
fabulously wealthy investment broker Baron Duarte (also Don Ameche). Baron
Duarte has an American wife (Alice Faye) — at least we assume she’s American because she’s not made up to look
Latina, she’s kept in all her usual blonde glory and she speaks in
American-accented rather than Latin-accented English — and he also owns an
airline that has just lost its contract to deliver air mail in Brazil. Without
that contract the company will be ruined and Baron Duarte will lose all his
money. Duarte disappears on a last-minute trip to Buenos Aires (returning to
the Argentinian setting of the previous film in the series) to try to get a
bank loan to keep his company going until he can renegotiate the mail contract
and get some revenue again, only in order to keep up his daily personal
appearance at the Rio stock exchange and his appointment to be the guest of
honor at a reception for the ambassador (Georges Renavent) — we’re never told
what country he’s the ambassador of — Duarte’s business associates Penna (S. Z.
Sakall, charming and cuddly as usual) and Salles (Curt Bois) pay Larry to
impersonate him. Larry pulls off the reception but at the stock exchange he
waves back and forth, not realizing these are buying signals, with the result
that instead of owning 51 percent of an airline that’s about to go out of
business, he now owns 100 percent. All of this is to ensure that Duarte’s hated
rival Machado (J. Carrol Naish) doesn’t experience the satisfaction of throwing
him out of business, but needless to say it also sparks a round of jealousy as
Mrs. Duarte suddenly finds her husband — or Larry, or whoever — a considerably
more attentive lover than she’s used to, while Carmen ends up with yet more
reasons to be flamboyantly jealous of Larry.
That Night in Rio began as a 1934 play called The Red Cat which the (pre-20th Century) Fox company
bankrolled for the movie rights; it only lasted 34 performances but Fox filmed
it anyway as Folies-Bergère,
Maurice Chevalier’s last U.S. movie for 20 years (he was still a major star in
America but his wife, the French singer Mistinguett, was homesick and no longer
wanted to live anywhere but in Paris). In 1951 they’d take this plot out of
mothballs a third time and give it to Danny Kaye for a film called On
the Riviera; I have never seen Folies-Bergère
and I haven’t seen On the Riviera for decades, though I remember it as more fun than That
Night in Rio, which is dazzlingly fun when
it’s actually in the nightclub where Larry and Carmen perform but surprisingly
dull during the long “comedy” scenes that separate the numbers. The film takes
off and flies when Carmen Miranda is center stage — in a movie in which all the
other performers (even such accomplished scenery-chewers as J. Carrol Naish and
Leonid Kinskey, who repeats his Down Argentine Way role as a lounge-lizard gigolo after the blonde
American heroine) seem oddly understated, her all out
charge-the-camera-full-speed-ahead energy is welcome and easily the best thing
about the film. Otherwise the best things about it are the glorious three-strip
Technicolor (these Fox musicals are one set of films that come off considerably
better on commercial DVD’s than home recordings or normal TV showings; the Fox
transfers, ballyhooed as major restorations, are almost eye-strainingly vivid
in their reproductions of the spectacular, sometimes garish hues of three-strip
in the 1940’s, though as Charles noted Carmen Miranda managed to call attention
to herself in the final number by not wearing anything blue but instead appearing in a green-and-red costume
that would have done just as well in the more primitive two-strip process) and
the energy of Warren’s songs. Alice Faye gets a couple of her usual foghorn
laments, including the title song, and Don Ameche has the interesting challenge
of singing in two voices (as the Baron he both speaks and sings in a lower
register and at a slower pace than he does as Larry, which is why I suspect he
was Larry rather than the Baron when he was doing the reprise of
“Chica-Chica-Boom-Chic” that was cut from the film originally but is presented
here as a “deleted scene” bonus), but it’s Carmen Miranda, her group (the Bando
da Lua, a samba ensemble she insisted on importing to the U.S. and using in all
her films) and the luscious photography of them by cinematographers Ray
Rennahan and Leon Shamroy (including some interesting red-filter effects on the
Bando’s samba drums, presaging Shamroy’s infamous experiments with color
filters on South Pacific 17 years
later) that make That Night in Rio
watchable.
