Rio

A Parisian swindler (Basil Rathbone) sentenced to Devil's Island eventually escapes to find his wife (Goldwyn Edsel Sigrid Gurie) has fallen in love with another man (Robert Cummings)...

The year 1939 is considered a high water mark in Golden Age Hollywood's studio era but RIO is a movie I doubt we'll hear much about in the future (godknows, I never did in the past). It's an odd-ball Universal "A" with a "name" cast (Basil Rathbone, Victor McLaglen, Robert Cummings, Leo Carillo, Billy Gilbert, and, at the time, Sigrid Gurie) and probably a "programmer" (a movie shown as the bottom half of a double-bill in big theaters and by itself in smaller venues) that came and went rather quickly. The IMDb labels it "film noir" but it's not -not that I could see, anyway. If anything, it's quite possibly a "proto-noir" but that's only because of the director, German émigré John Brahm (THE LODGER, HANGOVER SQUARE, THE LOCKET) and the fact the protagonist is an "anti-hero", something unusual for movies in 1939. Rathbone's the star -it's his adventures we're following- and being France's answer to Bernie Madoff and a cold-blooded murderer made him no less likable. Basil was right at home as a French fancy pants but making with the beefcake was pushing it a bit, especially when stripped to the waist on a chain gang or making a daring escape through the swamps. The setting was quite ambitious (Paris, Devil's Island, various nightclubs, the South American jungle, Rio during Carnivale) and nicely realized, considering, but those four songs were there, no doubt, to pad it out -or promote Sigrid Gurie, who warbled three of them (which was two too many if you ask me). Siggie was launched the year before by Samuel Goldwyn as "The Norwegian Garbo" when he starred her in THE ADVENTURES OF MARCO POLO and if her talents had been more than modest, it probably wouldn't have mattered when the press later found out she was born in Brooklyn -but it did and she faded fairly quickly. I'd give it a "recommended if it's not going out of your way" -provided it ever pops up anywhere.

In Rio, Basil Rathbone is Paul Reynard, a wealthy man seeking a loan from several banks. Actually, it transpires that he has given them all a lot of fraudulent bonds as collateral.

On his anniversary, he's arrested and shipped to Devil's Island. He makes his sidekick Dirk (Victor McLaglen) promise to keep an eye on his lovely wife Irene (Sigrid Gurie). Broke, Irene returns to her career of singing.

She then meets Bill Gregory (Robert Cummings), an engineer who was involved in a bridge that collapsed due to faulty materials - not his fault, but he is blamed. The two fall in love, although she stays loyal to her husband.

Reynard, however, escapes. There the trouble begins.

This is an odd, dark film, with some excellent performances. There are some good scenes - Reynard escaping through the swamp, Rio at Carnivale, and the nightclub scenes.

Not as good as the director's (John Brahm) other films, but recommended for fans of Rathbone and for the performances and atmosphere.

A bleak and dark drama of a swindler who moves from the pinnacles of fortune in Paris down to misery in a chain gang in the swamps of a Brazilian penal colony, from where he escapes in desperate longing for his wife, whom he knows is in Rio as a celebrated night club singer - she already was in Paris, and she probably moved to Rio just to be closer to him, in case he would escape, but the film never tells this, although it should have informed the audience of the obvious. In Rio, though, she is courted by an alcoholic former piano tuner who turned engineer and failed with a great project, so he took to drinking. There are some very funny scenes with him. He falls desperately in love with her, but then Basil Rathbone succeeds in escaping and finds her again - too late, it seems, for everything. It is difficult to classify this semi-noir of great and exotic adventure, but it definitely is interesting, and they could have made much more of it. Basil Rathbone is excellent, as always, and so is Victor McLaglen, while Sigrid Gurie only makes you long for Marlene Dietrich, who would have made a part like this so much better.

Well, that was a little bit boring. The cast are good - except Robert Cummings (Bill) as a disgraced engineer who has taken refuge in Rio. His drunken scenes are painful to sit through. He is the new love interest for café singer Sigrid Gurie (Irene) who is plying her trade in Rio as a way to be near her convicted fraudster of a husband Basil Rathbone (Reynard) housed in a jail on a nearby island. She intends to wait for his release but love has other ideas. Meanwhile, Rathbone escapes....

Where on earth is this Rio that the film is based in? I see no Portuguese speaking characters. What I do see is a lot of Spanish speaking Mexican types. There is obviously a place called Rio somewhere in Mexico. If this was Rio, Brazil, we needed some Carmen Miranda entertainment. As an aside, I can't stand Simon Le Bon's voice, so thankfully, the Duran Duran song "Rio" has wisely been left off the film's soundtrack.

The story is only interesting when Rathbone is on screen and the misrepresentation of Rio is criminally poor. We needed to see a tutti-frutti hat and less of Cummings' awful attempt at a drunkard. Victor McLaglen (Dirk) plays Rathbone's close friend with homosexual overtones (no man is that dedicated to another man without a love arrow from Cupid) and he does have a good moment right at the film's end.

1939 was a busy year for Basil Rathbone and sandwiched between 'Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' and 'Tower of London' is this bizarre opus in which he is utterly riveting as Reynard, a sociopathic swindler in true Stavisky mode.

His wife is played by the appealing Sigrid Gurie, promoted by Sam Goldwyn as 'The Siren of the Fjords' but actually born in Brooklyn. Her lover is Robert Cummings and Victor McLaglen is Reynard's henchman, whose devotion borders on the homoerotic. There is some feeble comic relief from Billy Gilbert and Leo Carillo and a few instantly forgettable songs.

A film that begins well but fails alas to live up to its promise and is redeemed by Hal Mohr's cinematography. It remains a must however for Rathbone devotees and is of interest as a taster for director John Brahm's stylish noirs of the following decade.