La Fiesta

Anna Case in La Fiesta (1926)

** (out of 4)

An early attempt at talking...

Anna Case sings and dances in this early sound film from Warner. Like many early sound films, this one has the 'look at me, you can hear me talk' feel, which leads to some pretty boring storytelling and a lazy camera. An 8-year-old Rita Hayworth is among the background dancers.

The best way to see this is on Turner Classic Movies who usually show it at least once a year. Those interesting in film history will want to check it out but others should avoid.

Future screen goddess Rita Hayworth makes her screen debut in this Vitagraph short subject La Fiesta. Of course Rita wasn't indicating all that much about what her future would be as she was only 8 years old.

Rita was then Margarita Carmen Cansino part of The Dancing Cansinos family dancing troupe and The Cansinos were part of a large production number from Carmen. Playing the lead was Anna Case of the Metropolitan Opera company and she does a mean Carmen.

Not much to tell her it's just a filmed record of a stage presentation of an operatic aria. But it was out a year before The Jazz Singer and this the brothers Warner showing some of their experimentation in sound.

One star makes a debut, one opera singer's art preserved.

"La Fiesta" is an early experimental sound film from Vitaphone, the branch of Warner Brothers that used its New York studio to film a wide variety of experimental sound films from the 1920s through the 30s. Unlike many which featured stark backdrops and little movement, "La Fiesta" features a nice set that looks like it's straight from Mexico and a large cast of singers, dancers and extras.

Anna Case is featured in the film and the Cansino family also is in the film. Now I have a question about this....and I could not find the answer on the internet. Is this the same Cansino family which Rita Hayworth grew up performing with as a girl? After all, her real name was Rita Cansino and she was quite the dancer before she took up acting....and was completely made over to look anything but Mexican-American by Columbia Pictures. I probably will never know.

As for what I do know for sure, compared to many of the Vitaphone films of the era, this one is a bit better at times and really stretches the sound technology with its large cast of singers. Case, sadly, comes off poorly as her singing is not nearly as loud and clear as the rest...which is odd and rather sad. Had Case been easier to hear, I would have scored this one higher.

Creaky, but worth seeing just to see ANYTHING with sound from 1926. The quality of the recording is not bad, actually - the orchestra sounds good, with nice effects from the drummer. However, the microphone was too far away from the singers, even from Anna Case; she needed to be another 10 feet closer! I think the reason for the poor camera work is that the camera was encased in a big, sound-proof booth with a window; there just wasn't much room to pan the lens.

I would never have guessed that Rita Hayworth, then 8 years old, was in this; the girl in the dance routine looks much older. Nice footwork, anyway. Love the Vaseline-haired guy (oh, brother. he-he) Anna Case's makeup was truly ghoulish - I suspect it was done by someone with very little or no experience in movies. Still, this film is good to see for the history value. Once.

It's difficult to figure out exactly what the purpose of this short was. If it was designed to serve as both a showcase for opera diva Anna Case and an example of what talkies could do, it fails miserably on both counts; Miss Case doesn't even appear until about five minutes into the film. The intervening time was taken up by a musical number by the background chorus and a dance number by the Cansinos (future sex goddess Rita Hayworth and her father), both of which were ruined by a combination of poor sound and incredibly inept staging by the director (who, justifiably, received no screen credit). He kept the entire number in one static long shot; the camera was so far away from the principals that no one was recognizable, and since many of the actors were costumed similarly, it was difficult to see when someone was actually moving. When the director finally did cut to a medium shot, instead of moving the camera with the dancers, he had the annoying habit of letting them move to the extreme left or right of the screen, then having the camera chase after them. It was not only distracting but self-defeating, as it completely ruined the fluidity and tempo of the scene. When Miss Case finally did appear on screen she was, frankly, unimpressive. She did have a beautiful voice, as you would expect from an opera singer, but she had no screen presence whatsoever, and for some reason was very heavily made up, which was especially evident when you compared her to two female extras standing in back of her during her aria.

This short can serve as a curio, but is so poorly made and incompetently staged, with such bad sound quality, that a curio is about the only thing it's good for.