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Archive for the ‘Xavier Cugat’ Category

Holiday In Mexico

20 Jul

Holiday In Mexico – directed by George Sidney. Musical. 128 minutes Color 1946.

★★★★

The Story: The daughter of the ambassador to Mexico convinces herself into an imbroglio and then sings her way out of it.

~

Jane Powell’s first film at MGM which produced, let’s say overproduced, ten years of her subsequent films. These were the sort of films one stayed away from in the dull days of DDI. Those were the times when The American Dream was just invented. It consisted then as now of two things: a tract home and golf. And that demented fiction: The Girl Next Door. Taken over from Dianna Durbin and Judy Garland, this presented the American teen-age lass as sparkling, as jolly, and as virginal as an icecream soda.

Jane Powell began very good at this, except that she not only plays characters who are irritating but she also is so. And she is so because, at this point in her development, everything she does as an actor is pat. It is new but it is never fresh, which makes it shiny but conventional. For she is never in the moment. She on top of the moment as one might be said to be on top of a carousel horse. So, while her responses are always on the money, they come out as miniature mugging. She’s not riding a real horse.

Three kinds of acting are on display here, and they are wonderful to behold in juxtaposition. Next to Powell as her father is that master of imperturbability, Walter Pidgeon. He is riding a real horse. He never brings anything new but everything he does is fresh, so it looks new. Everything he does belongs to him. Nothing is forced. Everything is right. He is easy in his craft. He has presence. He has bearing. He has humor about himself and others. His alias is Aplomb. He is completely responsive to the actors opposite him. And at the end he gives one of the most beautifully delivered, down-to-earth tablecloth speeches I have ever heard an actor negotiate.

The speech is good also because it’s well-written, although the same may not be said for the scenario as a whole, which involves our Jane, aged fifteen, running after José Iturbi, a grandfather. We won’t go into it. It is a wonder Xavier Cugat himself does not go after her; he was said to have an eye for Chihuahuas and nymphets. Chihuahuas and nymphets? Actually they’re both the same thing.

In the third kind of acting, Mikhail Rasumny, plays a Russian Ambassador whose daughter has fallen for Pidgeon. What was going on in The Moscow Art Theatre at that time had nothing to do with Lee Strasburg. This is brilliant prototypical comic Russian acting. Don’t miss it. One scene. He’s hilarious. A masterwork of its type. A lesson in the craft.

To say the film is a holiday is bunko; it is not a holiday; they are in residence – which is no more Mexican than the MGM backlot. And Cugat and Iturbi were Spanish.

Yet the whole business is beautifully produced and costumed and directed. And Iturbi’s piano numbers are a lot of fun to watch. As is the finale – where they all appear in a outdoor concert with our Jane singing Ave Maria (written by an Austrian) in an open air arena the size of Arizona.

 
 
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