Nancy Goes To Rio – directed by Robert Z. Leonard. Backstage Musical. 100 minutes, Color 1950.
★★★★★
The Story: A great musical stage star’s daughter is given the part her mother is supposed to play, leading to many complications.
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The costumes by Helen Rose which exploit The New Look, the settings by Gibbons and Smith, the hairstyles by Sydney Guillaroff, the set decoration by Edwin B. Willis are as fabulous as the makeup that pinks every pore of the leading ladies’ cheeks. Each production-value detail is given full focus, every color full registration, every sequin stardom. The dictum insisting that everything show is the earmark of true vulgarity. It is one typical to this studio. MGM, and it is mighty entertaining.
For the costumes are super-duper and the apartments are fabulous. As fabulous as the ever-sedate Carmen Miranda’s hat of 30,000 tiny open umbrellas.
The movie takes us to Rio, one supposes because Carmen Miranda was a contract player and she had to be used. She has red hair here and she is wonderful as always, with lightning-flash eyes and a smile as wide and gaudy as all Brazil. This was to be the last film in her MGM contract, and it was also the last in that of Ann Sothern, and the last film in which Jane Powell would contrive to appear as a teenager.
At twenty-one she is quite convincing as a seventeen year old hoyden. She plays and somewhat overplays one of those young thespians who performs real life as Drama. But she is very good to be with. She has that combination of a righteous center with a giving humor that Katharine Hepburn had her own version of. It gives Jane Powell’s playing solid ground – but with a playground on it. In her glassy soprano she sings Gershwin and she sings Puccini. She’s laid back as a singer, never forcing, focused on her tiny body and keeping that sparkle going in her generous blue eyes.
The film is a form of entertainment that probably killed MGM before long, reflecting as it did the dangerously influential unrealistic American family values of Louis B. Mayer — a continuation in Technicolor of the Andy Hardy/Judy Garland musicals of a few years before. It is a masterpiece of the expertise of artificiality.
I was also seventeen when this came out, and I took care not to go. Now, I sit back and enjoy the false virginity of MGM. Neat production numbers, a variety of songs, and a not-to-be-missed scene with Barry Sullivan and master actor Sig Arno as a waiter. Glen Anders is also on view. But one of my real reasons for watching it was the presence in it of that magnifico Louis Calhern. This was his year: he introduced Marilyn Monroe in Asphalt Jungle. (Monroe was best opposite much older men, and she had the greatest character actors in films to prove that true, Charles Laughton, Charles Coburn, and Calhern.) Calhern was an actor of insuperable finesse. The scene when Calhern’s and Sothern and Powell sing and dance to “Shine On Harvest Moon” is the most endearing musical number I have ever seen in a musical.
Now, That’s Entertainment! Catch it.