Mexican Spitfire (RKO, 1940)

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

Last night at 5 Turner Classic Movies showed two films witn Latin American themes, both of them from 1940 and both starring chariasmatic performers who met tragic early ends. I watched the first half-hour of the second film, Down Argentine Way, which I’d already commented on on moviemagg (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/05/down-argentine-way-20th-century-fox-1940.html), and which began with a lovely scene of Carmen Minranda doing “South American Way” in Portuguese (she had it in her contract that she would get to sing at least one song per film in Portuguese), after which it quickly degenerates into a rather dull farce comedy featuring Don Ameche – he’s supposed to be an Argentinian but he has one of the worst Latin American accents in the history of American film – and Betty Grable, who took over the female lead in this film after Alice Faye either had a heart attack or got pregnant (sources differ). The only reasons to watch Down Argentine Way are Carmen Miranda, the Nicholas Brothers (who do a truly spectacular routine to the title song) and the typically neon-bright three-strip Technicolor, especially as used by 20th Century-Fox.

The film they showed earlier was Mexican Spitfire, also from 1940 and a “B” movie from RKO which was actually a direct sequel to a film the studio had made the previous year, The Girl from Mexico. In that movie, Lupe Velez played Carmelita Fuentes, a girl from Mexico (natch) who manages to meet and marry an American executive, Dennis Lindsay (Donald Woods, as boring at another studio as he was at Warner Bros. in the early 1930’s), despite the opposition of his ferocious Aunt Delia (Elizabeth Risdon) and the Anglo girl Delia wanted him to marry instead of the girl from Mexico, Elizabeth Price (Linda Hayes). On Carmelita’s side is Aunt Delia’s long-suffering husband, Matt Linsday (Leon Errol, the Australian-born comedian who was a good friend of W. C. Fields and got to be in Fielts’ last starring movie, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break). The film was hosted by TCM’s Alicia Malone and Luis I. Reyes, author of a new book called Viva Hollywood about the contributions of Latin Americans to movie history in the classic era, and they both tried personfully to recast Lupe Velez’s role here as a free and independent woman instead of a particularly obnoxious stereotype, but she remains a particularly obnoxious stereotype, a hot-tempered Mexican given to outbursts of rapid-fire Spanish which she refuses to translate because the original dialogue was probably pushing the Production Code.

Mexican Spitfire deals with Dennis Lindsay’s attempts to sign the imperious, eccentric Lord Epping (also Leon Errol, who in 1951 would do a short called Lord Epping Returns, not that we really wanted him to) to a contract for a Mexican-themed radio show. Dennis invites Lord Epping to his home for dinner, at which he hopes to finalize the contract and get Epping to sign it, but when Epping cancels on the dinner Carmelida gets Uncle Matt to impersonate him (hence the dual role for Leon Errol). Only the real Lord Epping has a change of heart and, without calling ahead, decides to have dinner with the Lindsays after al and just shows u p at their home. From there the film devolves into a French farce, with the two Lords Epping just missing each other all night. In an earlier scene Carmelita showed up at Dennis’s office and Dennis passed her off as his secretary – which leads to a nice dictation scene as Carmeiita is supposed to be taking notes on the contract but is actually doing a devastating caricature of Epping (fortunately Dennis remencers enough of what’s supposed to be in the contract to reconstruct it), and when Dennis shows up at his home he’s got two copies of the contract. Only Carmelita, having no idea that the real Lord Epping is in the apartment, thinks she has to keep Epping (who, she believes, is really Uncle Matt in “Epping” drag) from signing the contract for fear he’ll be prosecuted for fraud. So she spills ink on one of the contracts ahd sets fire to the other with a lighter she’s used to light Epping’s cigar. There’s also a not particularly funny running gag in which the real Epping wants roast beef for duinner, while Uncle Matt can’t stand roast beef and keeps asking the Lindsays’ butler to make him poached eggs instead.

After the disastrous dinner party Carmelita and Matt go to Mexico, where they both obtain divorces from a crooked promoter named Henry Sharpe (Earle Hodgkins), only the real Mexican authorities arrest Sharpe as a fraudster who’s selling phony “divorces.” Not knowing this, Dennis prepares to marry Elizabeth even though he’s still in love with Carmelita, and the film’s climax takes place at Mexican Pete’s restaurant, where Carmelita has gone to get a job as a nightclub singer now that she’s a single woman again – only she gets the telegram from the Mexican cops who busted Sharpe that tells her she and Dennis are still married after all. She goes to confront him and Elizabeth at the restaurant, and the various characters end up in a food fight that’s about the only truly amusing thing in this so-called “comedy.” Carrying on their defense of Lupe Velez after the film ended, Malone and Reyes said she was a genuinely talented singer and actress even though in Mexican Spitfire (unlike its predecessor, The Girl from Mexico) she doesn’t get to sing at all (and a song or two from the star would have dramatically helped this iflm’s entertainment value). Velez was the daughter of a Mexican colonel and an opera singer, only her dad was killed in the Mexican Revolution and she had to go to work on stage to support the family. She came to Hollywood in 1927 to star opposite Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. in his film The Gaucho (Malone and Reyes made two major mistakes about this film: they said it was a vehicle for Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., who was just 17 when it was made; they also claimed Mary Pickford, Fairbanks, Sr.’s real-life wife at the time, was a co-star when in fact she just made a cameo appearance at the end).

Later Velez appeared in D. W. Griifith’’s Lady of the Pavements, a part-talkie from 1928 in whcih she made her vocal debut on screen. In 1929 she did another part-talkie, Wolf Song, opposite Gary Cooper, and the two had a torrid affair that made headlines during its brief duration before it expired. Though Cooper wasn’t married at the time (as he was when he had a similarly flaming affair with the young Patricia Neal when the two were making The Fountainhead together in 1948),he still caught a lot of flak for dating a Mexican, and Velez apparently never got over himi dumping her. Later she married MGM’s Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, but that only lasted five years – ironically, she played Jane in the MGM spoof Hollywood Party with Jimmy Durante as “Scharzan.” Velez was at first known as a dramatic actress who starred in a 1931 film of Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection, which was made in both English and Spanish versions, but in 1932 she was cast as Pepper in a film called Hot Pepper and that established her as a comedienne doing the “Mexican spitfire” schtick well before this series. In 1944 Velez had an affair with a little-known actor named Harald Maresch, who got her pregnant and then refused to marry her. Not wanting the ignominy of having a baby out of wedlock, Velez committed suicide at age 36 with an overdose of sleeping pills – exactly the same age as a later Hollywood legend, Marilyn Monroe (though I remain convinced that Monroe’s death was neither suicide nor murder; she died of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs, and the only reason anyone ever thought differently was we didn’t know anywhere nearly as much about prescription drug abuse then as we do now). Luis Reyes even weirdly suggested that if Lupe Velez had lived into the 1950’s, she’d have done TV and instead of L Love Lucy, it would have been I Love Lupe – which quite frankly would have been ludicrous. The only way I Love Lupe would have worked is if they had switched the genders and given Velez a white co-star – preferably one with a sense of humor in his own right, which Donald Woods definitely did not have.