This film has always been erroneously regarded as Argentina's first talking picture and the film that introduced the film industry model. But that it is simply not exactly true. By 1939 its production company, Argentina Sono Film, credit this film as the beginning of their success and the artistic triumph of three of its artists: Libertad Lamarque, Luis Sandrini and Pepe Arias. Domingo Di Núbila, in his mediocre "Historia del Cine Argentino", contributed to the false stories about this artistic and commercial failure.
Producer Atilio Mentasti and director L. J. Moglia Barth, however, did have an industrial vision for the Argentinean film. But what they didn't have at the time, in 1933, was experience. They had to learn the hard way how to make a success of their company. After this failure, their following film, "Dancing" was even a bigger failure. Their third film however, "Riachuelo" from was actually the landmark film for Argentina Sono Film and the one that saved this company from disaster.
In 1933 "¡Tango!" was an attempt to gather most of the popular singers and orchestras of the day in one single movie. But the production was spoiled by uncountable and obvious defects that frustrated the audiences. Worse, the artists suffered due to terrible camera work and equally horrendous sound recording technologies. In fact, the whole film looks extremely primitive, as it was produced ten years before, and actually did nothing for the artist involved in it.
It is a sad experience to watch great singers like Mercedes Simone, Azucena Maizani, Libertad Lamarque and Alberto Gómez perform some of their most famous songs that marred by a bad recording technology and an unglamorous cinematography that made them look uglier and older than in later, and much better, films.
