Chivo, a singer who works in a movie theater providing live entertainment, is and apprehended by a music-loving Mexican bandit Braganza who wants to make Chivo part of his band. Braganza, who admires American gangsters, also kidnaps Jane and her rich boyfriend, Bill. to become more like the American movie gangsters he admires.1h 26min | Comedy, Musical | 2 October 1936
Director: Rouben Mamoulian
Stars: Nino Martini, Ida Lupino, Leo Carrillo, Mischa Auer.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0027660/
Watched online on small screen, good print.
Watched this now, so very very out of sequence, because a copy finally came up for auction on eBay, and I wanted to know whether to bid. Mamoulian has only 18 director credits, and I adore Love Me Tonight ('32), so here's another musical, had to give it a try.
We get only one person singing, and NM sings a LOT. The Soundtracks list only 5 songs, but some day I'd like to record the duration of each; I think they're longer than usual songs sung. I like opera, but this is like listening to a Pavarotti cd. I'd prefer Three Tenors, or SOME variety. During the Good Neighbor Policy era (WW2), musicals were not devoted to one singer, not even Carmen Miranda.
The story is pretty bad. NM becomes an early version of Patty Hearst, enlisted to become an unwilling part of the gang while he is captive. He and 2 henchmen are the ones who kidnap the couple. IL (b. 1918!) is a strong-willed young woman who stands up to the banditos on the road (originally seeking to steal the couple's car), and also during captivity. While NM guards them, the couple persuade him to let the man escape (he justifies that he's in more danger, since he's the rich one, and he has to travel through the desert), but she recognizes that he's a coward, willing to abandon her, and not worthy of her love.
But then she has a big pottery fight with NM, and falls in love with him. It's a little more complicated than that, but her moment of psychological health is completely reversed by those results. Then again, it gives NM that much more reason to Sing.
I wish I could say Leo Carillo or Mischa Auer were amusing here.
I did catch a moment of Mamoulian-signature shadows on the wall, with the banditos lined up. I may not have seen the entire sequence, but I got the impression of dolls on a shelf.
I was not watching this carefully, so it may deserve a better rating than I'm giving today. I encourage myself to watch on a bigger screen. Hopefully the sound won't go out of sync again (I hope that's a result of having too many tabs open, and a direct cast to the TV doesn't run through the same memory constraints.)
Pickford-Lasky, distr. UA, dir. Mamoulian; 6
