Jolanda e il re della samba

It was shown on TCM this past weekend. It's a fantasy musical which has sort of unanimously been regarded as a mild stinker-- but amazingly has been amalgamated with a cult following over the years. (What're you gonna do?) It's not a serious piece of movie- not even in the Hollywood-attempting-a-certain-atmosphere vain. One look at the artificial sets, the candy-box Technicolor, and the performances and you need- I repeat NEED- to suspend yourself for 106 minutes and just let go. Lucille Bremer was actually a fine dancer (if you watched her and Fred Astaire in ZIEGFELD FOLLIES), but her abilities are not put to best use here. Record it (as I did), and just fast-forward to "Coffee Time," a sensational, four-minute hand-clapping dance performed in a Latin Carnival, on a floor of swirling black-and-white zebra stripes, easily the best thing in the movie.

This is an extraordinary film for 1945. The story, a fantasy, is sort of sappy and the music is forgettable. Frank Morgan and Fred Astaire play themselves. And yet there is an overall quality about the film, a box office disaster, that makes it highly enjoyable. Perhaps it's the way Vincent Minelli handled the production. Perhaps it's Lucille Bremer's almost dazzling beauty. The dance numbers are a whole cut above the usual tap dance routines we expect with Astaire. The special effects are haunting at times.

It's Astaire's "Invitation to the Dance." Well worth watching.

It's impossible to hate any film with Fred Astaire, Frank Morgan and Mildred Natwick giving their considerable all, but it's awfully hard to like any film with such forgettable songs (out of Harry Warren's bottom drawer), forgettable dances inspired by them from choreographer Eugene Loring (except for the promising percussive *introduction* to an ultimately dreary number called "Coffee Time") and a script that never pays off on a single one of its satiric possibilities.

At it's best, the old "studio system" of production by second guessing and committee could produce masterpieces. At its muddled worst, it produced things like YOLANDA AND THE THIEF and blamed them on the cast. Coming at about the middle of Fred Astaire's long film career, and early in Lucille Bremer's four year one, it couldn't ultimately hurt Astaire who would be back on top in three years with EASTER PARADE (interesting that his brief "retirement" in response to this turkey is not remembered in the same way Bette Davis's similarly motivated walkout from another studio is for his being "difficult"), but it did nothing to promote Bremer's career despite what looked like acceptable dancing and at least minimal acting skills and a certain homogenized beauty.

Chief blame would appear to lie with Irving Brecher's script from Ludwig Bemelmans & Jacques Thery's nasty little fairy tale of a story. Trading on the worst stereotypes of the evils of a Convent education (not that a too sheltered education isn't a bad thing), Bremer's "Yolanda" is too naive to be believed and a victim looking for a crime. Only those ALMOST as naive in the audience will not recognize Leon Ames's "Mr. Candle" character immediately for what he turns out to be, and the simple (even expected) plot twists which could make his character and Mildred Natwick's "Aunt Amarilla" interesting are never forthcoming.

Only Natwick's self centered monologue when Bremer returns to her home from the convent rises above the rest of the script and is very funny - creating hopes for what follows that never pay off. The final scene of the film is so perfunctory you get the impression the studio told Minnelli to wrap up filming regardless of what was left to do - but fans of the British sci-fi sitcom "Red Dwarf" may be amused to note that the central gimmick of the scene (and the film's only moment of misdirection or real irony) was stolen years later as the basis for a Red Dwarf episode in its first season.

Among things which ARE of interest in the film: the man who went on to become the great Broadway dancer and choreographer, Matt Mattox, is buried somewhere in the innocuous mess as an unbilled "featured dancer." One wonders if the (uncredited) "Dilettante" played by an actor calling himself "Andre Charlot" is any relation to the great British producer who introduced Gertrude Lawrence and Beatrice Lillie to U.S. shores for the first time in the 1920's?

I'd always been curious about this one, especially considering its rather unhappy reputation as a major disappointment in the Fred Astaire/Vincente Minnelli canon, and it's fairly easy to see why. Turner Classic Movies scheduled it recently and I tuned in to watch something that certainly made me glad Technicolor was invented but which fell somewhat short of its intended mark.

The story is absolute piffle, almost redeemed by Mildred Natwick's genuinely funny portrayal of a dotty aunt. (Check out the sequence where she welcomes Yolanda home from her years at a convent school.) M-G-M stalwarts Leon Ames and Frank Morgan (Was he in every single class "A" Metro production from the late Thirties through the early Fifties?) lend reliable support with the little they're given to do. And Fred Astaire and Lucille Bremer get (only) two opportunities to display their dancing compatibility. Astaire, of course, managed to complement all of his dancing partners with his patented style and grace (even the miscast Joan Fontaine in "A Damsel in Distress") but, as a matter of personal opinion, I think that Ms. Bremer runs a very close second to the gorgeous Cyd Charisse as one of his most elegant and beautiful co-stars. She's too old for her role in this one, admittedly, but she's nevertheless quite charming and a prime object for the luscious Technicolor cinematography of Charles Rosher.

The real star of this misbegotten show, however, is the opulence of the very artificial art direction, set decoration, and costuming. It's Hollywood at its most baroque and Minnelli keeps his cameras gliding through it all as if on angels' wings. If you're not looking for one of the Arthur Freed's unit's bona fide musical classics, this one will provide a phantasmagoria of color and motion that's rarely been equaled.

This one is a strange one. Set in a fictional South American Country, Fred Astaire plays a con man who impersonates a guardian angel to Lucille Bremer's innocent, convent raised character. While he is trying to get to her vast fortune, he of course falls in love with her.

The story is over-shadowed by the bizarre musical numbers. There is a dream sequence which is one of the longest, most mesmerizing musical numbers ever put on film (eat your heart out Salvadore Dali). The number `Coffee Time' looks like it was fun to film and the dance floor will cause you to,have optical illusions.

The sets are very opulent and the Technicolor is breathtaking. Over-all I rate this film highly because it is so off-beat. I read that this film cost 6 million dollars to make, and was a huge box office failure, and that Fred Astaire nearly retired because of his experience with it.