Carnaval à Costa Rica

This is good to watch if only for Vera-Ellen, Celeste Holme, Ceasar Romero, J. Carrol Naish, Anne Revere, and especially, the great crooner Dick Haymes who had a marvelous voice and wasn't a bad actor either.....only the material was schlocky in this one. I would recommend Costa Rica use this for tourism!

This 20th Century Fox musical really isn't very good, but if you like the cast, you can give it a try like I did. I love Vera-Ellen and always try her movies since she didn't make very many. Her talents really aren't utilized in this movie, though. Her dancing is down-played, her famous legs are hidden, she's given a dishwater-colored wig to make her look Costa Rican -What?- and for some unknown reason she's scrubbed clean of all her makeup. Without her eye makeup, she looks like Shirley Temple's homelier sister, instead of the made-up glamourous lady she usually plays.

The plot is funny, though. Vera-Ellen and Cesar Romero's families have arranged their marriage. They've never met, and she wants to be free to fall in love. Cesar already has a girlfriend, Celeste Holm, so he doesn't want to get married either. To thwart the engagement, he sets a plan to make himself repulsive to her so she'll call off the engagement. He wears dark glasses to take care of his watering eyes, stoops over, coughs incessantly due to an infected trachea, shuffles little steps because it's difficult for him to stand for long periods of time without getting tired, and asks for her help in taking his various pills because he's color-blind. It's very funny, but since Vera-Ellen's polite, she doesn't call things off.

At the carnival, though, she meets Dick Haymes and falls in love. She a ridiculous pick-up line and doesn't care about anything except his supposed pretty face. But what about Cesar Romero's pretty face? And what's wrong with these studios putting talented people in musicals and not letting them participate? In State Fair, trained opera singer Dana Andrews wasn't allowed to sing; and in Carnival in Costa Rica, trained ballroom dancer Cesar Romero wasn't allowed to dance. I didn't enjoy this one, but you can try it out and see if you like it.

I saw this movie in 1947 when it first was released. Mainly because I was a young dance student at that time and I wanted to see the great Leonide Massine, famous because of his discovery by Serge Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe. He replaced the great Vaslav Nijinsky. He appeared in this film during his latter years, but even so you can see what a great dancer he was.

Unfortunately, the producers of this film did not really understand or appreciate his fame and greatness, or give him proper credit. He could have been just another studio dancer. Vera Ellen had a hard time keeping up with him during their only dance sequence.

Interesting that Massine, who came from Moscow and was a Russian trained in the Russina ballet, became such a wonderful Spanish dancer.

This seems to have been his forte and shows well in this film. A pity that I was too young to ever have seen him on the stage. But his choreography is continually revived by ballet companies the world over.

Mixture of the new Latin appreciation with the old Hollywood guard results in stilted musical from Fox. Vera-Ellen, who ricochets around the dance floor while never losing her smile, plays a young lass down South American way who changes her mind about an arranged marriage to Cesar Romero. She loves creepy, corn-fed Dick Haymes instead, while Cesar is currently squiring New York gal Celeste Holm around Costa Rica. The weirdest casting must be rigid-backed Anne Revere as Vera-Ellen's mother, who hovers over her daughter like a clucking goose yet doesn't even recognize her own child when she sees her on a parade float. The production is well-dressed--and blessedly gets outside of the studio on several occasions--but the music score seems built around one monotonously cheerful tune, and Romero comes off like a Latin Don Ameche: whipped and all wet. *1/2 from ****

This 20th Century Fox musical has several problems, including an uneven script and uninspired choreography. However, the flaws are countered with some strengths. The color photography and costumes are lovely. And the cast is good, especially leading lady Vera-Ellen and Celeste Holm.