Argentine Nights (Universal, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Argentine Nights was the first film made by the rambunctious comedy team the Ritz Brothers (their family name was Joachim but they got “Ritz” from the cracker) at Universal Pictures after they’d closed out their 20th Century-Fox contract due to disputes over the quality of their films – though they ended up at Universal doing a series of hour-long “B”’s that even their lesser Fox efforts look like Gone With the Wind by comparison. Argentine Nights wasn’t a “B”” it was an estimable film running 84 minutes and was Universal’s attempt to respond to the call for films set in Latin America Franklin Roosevelt’s administration had issued to Hollywood to back up his “Good Neighbor Policy.” Argentine Nights also seems to have been Universal’s attempt to get ahead of 20th Century-Fox’s big-budget extravaganza Down Argentine Way, which co-starred Don Ameche and Betty Grable (who got the part at the last minute when Alice Faye dropped out and finally achieved stardom after a decade of being kicked around Hollywood) and featured the American film debut of the so-called “Brazilian Bombshell,” Carmen Miranda.

Universal released Argentine Nights on September 6, 1940, five weeks before the release of Down Argentine Way on October 11, and it seems like the seven writers (five credited, two not) on Argentine Nights – J. Robert Bren, Gladys Atwater, Arthur T. Horman, Ray Golden, Sid Kuller, Olive Connor and Paul Gerard Smith – either got a peek at what their confrères at Fox (Rian James, Ralph Spence, Darrell James and future 1959 Ben-Hur screenwriter Karl Tunberg) were doing, or they were withdrawing from the same cliché bank. Argentine Nights begins with a sequence worthy of the Marx Brothers or W. C. Fields: the shareholders of a company called “Colossal Ideas, Inc.” are assembled for their annual meeting (which features delegates from each state under a standard with their state’s name, which makes it look more like a political convention than a shareholders’ meeting) and are waiting for the company’s board of directors to fly in. Only the board consists of the Ritz Brothers, and they’re a lot more skilled at separating their investors from their money than in actually earning a return on investments (sort of like the Trump Organization).

The Ritzes have a solution: they declare bankruptcy (they even get to sing an ode to “Chapter 77B,” the operative bankruptcy law at the time – today it’s called Chapter 11) and take the two assets they have, the Andrews Sisters and an all-woman band led by Bonnie Brooks (Constance Moore), to Argentina, where they have an offer to perform at the New Mañana Hotel in Buenos Aires. Only the “new” Mañana Hotel was just a con worked on an elderly Argentine couple, Señor and Señora Viejas (Paul Porcasi and Ferike Boros), by a schemer who presented plans for such an edifice and got the Viejases to give him a thousand head of cattle (this is Argentina, remember?) which he said he would sell for them to raise the capital to build the New Mañana. Only, of course, he kept the money for himself and left them with the Old Mañana (a tiny little resort well off the beaten path of Buenos Aires) and one milking cow. Many of the best gags in Argentine Nights take place on the trip to Argentina, which the Andrews Sisters and Bonnie’s band take as steerage passengers and on which the Ritz Brothers stow away (and recycle as many of the gags as their writers dared from the Marx Brothers’ two stowaway movies, Monkey Business and A Night at the Opera) until the Andrewses, the Ritzes and the band members hit on the idea of locking up the ship’s own (all-male) orchestra so the captain has to give them all first-class cabins and six meals a day so Bonnie’s band will play at the ship’s nightly dance.

They make it to Argentina and clamber aboard what they don’t realize is a tour bus – so they get led around all the sights of Buenos Aires (at least the ones Universal had stock footage of) before they end up at the Old Mañana. Meanwhile, the women in the cast have met a whole bunch of more or less hunky Argentine men, and Bonnie has attracted the attentions of Edoardo (future Superman George Reeves, who despite all the black goop in his hair and the little moustache to make him look Latino comes off like we’re in an alternate version of the Superman myth in which baby Kal-El’s rocket landed in Argentina). Edoardo is sort of the Don Ameche character in this film; he’s a star athlete (albeit in polo instead of horse racing) and he’s looking for a spot to host the welcome-home party after the Argentinian polo team won the world’s championship. (Well, you’re kind of hard to beat if your team captain is Superman.) Only, in order to build up the mystique of the Old Mañana, the Viejases tell the Ritzes and the girls that the place is surrounded by bandits, including the most notorious one of all, “El Tigre,” and George Reeves (or maybe a voice double) sings a song while leading his bandit horde (really his polo team) on horseback and suddenly it seems like we’re in a Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy movie.

Eventually the Old Mañana’s opening is a success, Edoardo gets Bonnie, the other polo players get the members of Bonnie’s band and the Andrews Sisters are stuck with the Ritz Brothers – who in an oddly Laurel-and-Hardyesque finish go out to collect the phony “Detour” signs they set up to steer people to the Old Mañana, only there’s a real sign with the word “PELIGRO” on it (which, of course, the Ritzes don’t understand) warning that the bridge is out. The Ritzes don’t realize there isn’t a bridge anymore and in a neat special-effects shot they end up suspended in mid-air where the bridge used to be – only once they realize the bridge is out, they fall into the river below and make a big splash as the end title comes up. Argentine Nights is a perfectly reasonable 84 minutes’ worth of screen entertainment, with no fewer than 10 songs crammed into its running time, most of them sung by the Andrews Sisters – who made their film debut here and got to sing one of their biggest hits, “Rhumboogie,” a typical Don Raye-Gene De Paul novelty mashing together two then-current dance crazes, the rhumba and the boogie-woogie. (It’s one of my favorite songs from the period and I have three records of it – the Andrews Sisters’ own, one by Gene Krupa’s band with Irene Daye on vocal, and one by Bob Zurke’s band with Evelyn Poe on vocal.)

“Rhumboogie” is heard here twice, once by the Andrews Sisters at the Colossal Ideas convention and once later on board ship lip-synched by the Ritz Brothers in drag to the Andrews’ record (another rip-off from the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business, as well as an eerie anticipation of the undoing of Milli Vanilli: the record slows down, speeds up and ultimately gets stuck as the Ritzes try to mime to it). The company gets an even sillier dance match-up, “Brooklynonga,” by Sid Kuller, Ray Golden and Hal Borne (Borne was usually Fred Astaire’s rehearsal pianist and they wrote a few songs together), which appears as the final number at the Old Mañana and in which the Andrews Sisters have so much grotesque makeup slathered on their faces I briefly wondered whether these, too, were the Ritz Brothers in drag..Years ago I remember reading an interview with an Andrews Sister (I can’t remember which one) in which she complained about what Universal’s legendary make-up artist Jack P. Pierce had done to them in this movie, and when the interviewer pointed out that Pierce had created the Frankenstein Monster, the Mummy, the Wolf-Man and all the other makeups for Universal’s famous horror films, Ms. Andrews said, “Well, he may have been great for Boris Karloff, but he was lousy for us!” Seeing how grotesque they look in this final sequence, I can see why she was complaining.

Argentine Nights is as derivative as all get-out, and one can see why the Ritz Brothers don’t have the modern-day fan base the Marx Brothers do – my husband Charles once joked that the Ritzes seemed like a bizarre attempt to hybridize the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges, and I replied that one problem with the Ritz Brothers is that, unlike the Marxes or the Stooges (two of whom were brothers), they didn’t really create identifiable characters: one could watch a Ritz Brothers movie and, unless one of them addresses another by name, not know for the life of you which Ritz is which. Argentine Nights is hardly a patch on Down Argentine Way, which has the advantages of color, bigger star names in the romantic leads (Don Ameche and Betty Grable may be far from the greatest actors of all time, but they sure outdo George Reeves and Constance Moore), a lavish production, a dazzling star turn by the Nicholas Brothers and, above all, Carmen Miranda. (Later in the 1940’s Universal would try to duplicate Carmen Miranda’s appeal by signing her younger sister Aurora.) But it’s a fun movie and hardly as embarrassing as some of the Ritzes’ later Universal credits.