NFR Project: 'Down Argentine Way' (1940)

 

NFR Project: ‘Down Argentine Way’

Dir: Irving Cummings

Scr: Rian James, Ralph Spence

Pho: Leon Shamroy, Ray Rennahan

Ed: Barbara McLean

Premiere: Oct. 11,1940

89 min.

A decorative little bauble of a film, it exemplifies an escapist American impulse that was soon to be sniffed out by World War Two.

It seems that FDR wanted to improve relations with Central and South America due to undue Nazi influence down south. This Good Neighbor Policy of his spawned several pro-Latin extravaganzas such as Flying Down to Rio (1933) That Night in Rio and Week-end in Havana (both 1941), and Disney’s The Three Caballeros (1944), efforts to “understand our southern neighbors,” as the propaganda put it. These somewhat condescending outings into a variety of cultural experiences purported to increase awareness and true understanding of these diverse cultures; however, it served as an inaccurate depiction of a culture studded with star-making turns by Betty Grable and Carmen Miranda.

Here, in garish Technicolor, the gossamer-thin plot concerns the falling in love of two rich kids, wealthy horse breeders Ricardo (Don Ameche, an Italian-American) and Glenda (Grable), whose families, misunderstanding things, complicate their relationship through misplaced hostility. There are several white actors playing prominent Latin American characters, including J. Carrol Naish, Henry Stephenson, and Leonid Kinskey. They are supported by a cast of entertainers, many not native to Argentina. In fact, this film was banned in Argentina due to audience outrage at Hollywood’s impression of their culture, which is illustrated in the film with Mexican and Caribbean cultural activities – rendering the film culturally tone-deaf.

The highlights of this are the performances of Carmen Miranda, the fabled “Brazilian bombshell.” She gets three numbers, as opposed to Grable and Ameche’s two. Still under contract to her New York nightclub, her parts of the film were made in New York studios and shipped west, to be inserted into the larger film as needed. She’s undoubtedly a beautiful and accomplished singer . . . but she got stuck in her introductory stereotype of the fruit-wearing, beturbaned dervish, a role she was destined to play ad infinitum.

The other big find, filmically, is Betty Grable. A thoroughly wholesome and unobjectionable blonde, she could sing, could dance, could do a light and gentle kind of comedy that the viewer can float on. She had been around, appearing in dozens of films, but this marked her big break. She became, with Rita Hayworth, a war-time bombshell that all the troops adored. She was regally beautiful, but she had a screen persona that was very normal, very approachable.

She gets to strut her stuff in some numbers here, when not punctuated with visits from Miss Mirands, and from the fabulous and amazing Nicholas Brothers, dancers extraordinaire which behoove you to look up and watch all their fabled onscreen dance routines.

This feel-good kind of family entertainment would become the standard for studio-driven comic American musicals, a trend that would last through the early 1950s.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Fantasia.