1h 37min | Musical | 28 March 1947 | Color
Director: Gregory Ratoff
Stars: Dick Haymes, Vera-Ellen, Cesar Romero, Celeste Holm, Anne Revere, J. Carrol Naish.
Léonide Massine ... choreographer
Visually gorgeous. The costumes are very colorful, and the camera displays them beautifully.
IMDb lists Costa Rica as a filming location, and the crew list includes a translator. The outdoor scenery is very pretty, as lush and green as I'd expect from Costa Rica.
Unfortunately, the camera does not film the dances well. We get a lot of waist-up shots when legs are working. A LOT. Very aggravating. And the dancing is folkloric. VE does some added flourishes, but really her dancing skills are wasted here. (However, being a completist, I'm glad to have this disc.)
DH sings 4 songs, 1 with VE (dubbed). She sings (dubbed) another song, and dances 2 songs. CH shares 1 of DH's songs, and 1 of VE's, and dances that one with the chorus. A total of 10 songs are listed in Soundtracks. Not in the Soundtracks: CR social-dances with CH in a nightclub. But they don't take the floor, and it's brief. So Ratoff/Fox didn't seize that opportunity either.
CR playing sick to thwart the arranged marriage is not very funny, and CR can be very funny. I missed how/why CR & DH knew each other. CR (b. 1907) looks much too old to have come fresh from his 3rd semester of college (1 each at Harvard, Yale/Princeton (I've forgotten which), U. of Florida).
JN is very good as usual with his "Latin" characterization. VE does not pretend to have a Costa Rican accent. And the Americans in the film say Costa like cost-a instead of coast-a, and none of the Costa Ricans wince. How does a Los Angeles-based industry NOT know how to pronounce Spanish in the '40s, especially 5 years into the Good Neighbor Policy?
The couples and the parents avoid each other with lots of frantic movement, but I don't really care who gets whom, so I'm not engaged by the histrionics.
Fox, dir. Ratoff; 6
