Year 13, Day 116 - 4/26/21 - Movie #3,820
BEFORE: Walt Disney carries over from "Class Action Park", and I watched the Oscars in-between. Walt Disney still owns the record for the most Oscars, 22 wins and 59 nominations. I wasn't even thinking about that when this film ended up here, another accident, but of course there are no accidents, just me taking advantage of coincidences.
If my viewing of nominated films counts as any kind of endorsement, or to whatever degree I was "rooting" for the films I'd seen, I did pretty poorly, I'd only seen the winners in 5 categories, and really, that was just three films. "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" won for Best Costume Design and Best Makeup and Hairstyling, "Soul" won for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score, and I'd watched "Two Distant Strangers", which won for Best Live-Action Short. That's all I'd seen, out of the 23 winners in the big categories - so now I've got some catching up to do, I put all the nominated features on my lists, and I'm planning to get to three of them in May - "One Night in Miami", "A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon" and "Tenet". That's the best I can do for now, because I still have Oscar-nominated films from previous years to get to, like "Judy" from 2019 and "Bohemian Rhapsody" from the year before that. It's a process.
TCM is still working through the nominated films that start with the letter "S", and here's their line-up for tomorrow, April 27, Day 27 of "31 Days of Oscar". Almost done:
12:30 am "Summer of '42" (1971)
Damn, my stats tomorrow are nearly as bad as the ones from yesterday's awards ceremony. Hitting for just 2 out of 12, overall that means 124 out of 314, or 39.4%. In both cases, it's just not my year, and I've got a lot of work still to do.
THE PLOT: The story of the 1941 Goodwill Tour to South America, made by Walt Disney and his staff.
AFTER: There's a story here, and then there's sort of a story-behind-the-story too, which I think I'd find a bit more interesting. A few months before Pearl Harbor, when several European countries were already at war with Germany and Italy, the U.S. government tasked Walt Disney to go on a sort of "goodwill tour" to South America, because people were still unsure how far the war would extend, and which side countries like Argentina, Brazil and Chile might ally with. Since Disney didn't think of himself as any kind of politician or ambassador, the story goes that he initially refused - but when it got re-pitched to him as a chance to learn about South American culture, meet some potential new characters and maybe develop some films about that, he was totally on board.
Beyond Disney's love of strip-mining other cultures for inspiration, something he was very good at from stealing stories from European fairy tales, there was a financial reason as well - the U.S. government agreed to back the films that he made, so even if they didn't make money at the box office, the studio still wouldn't lose money, thanks to federal backing. Well, then, how could he say no? Meanwhile, there was a call among the employees of the Disney Animation studio to unionize, and Walt took this rather personally, hadn't he paid them for their time? Now they wanted benefits and raises in addition to the prestige they got for being DisneyCo. employees? You see, Walt, prestige is great but it doesn't pay your mortgage, fix your crooked teeth or send your kids to college.
What's suggested here is that the government helped fix the union disputes while Walt was away on tour, but I heard it was really Walt's brother, Roy, who was the businessman of the family, who negotiated with the budding union while Walt was out of town. This makes sense, and once everything got worked out and the studio still needed to do a round of layoffs, it was decided that an equal number of union and non-union employees would lose their jobs. Umm, that's the solution? Being equitable is great, but losing your job is shitty from the employee's standpoint, no matter what. Still, this union dispute sounds to me like a much more interesting story than watching Walt and a bunch of animators, artists and designers travel around South America not learning the language and expecting all the natives to speak English.
There were a couple of themed shorts that resulted from the trip, "Saludos Amigos" and "The Three Caballeros", but I haven't seen those. I've seen clips of Donald Duck interacting with a green macaw bird character (José Carioca?) and then other clips of Goofy learning the difference between American cowboys and the gauchos of Argentina, but I'm still not really sure to what extent Walt Disney really understood the culture down there. Honestly it feels like he was spoon-feeding bits of it to ignorant Americans who probably didn't care. Roosevelt's "Good Neighbor" programs also introduced Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda to America, and I don't think many Americans understood what she was singing about or why she wore a hat made out of fruit. (I've researched it before, and I still don't get it...)
The problems come in when someone tries to take elements of another culture and then represent them in American movies - back in the 1940's and 1950's there was little of the "politically correct" mentality we have now, and that explains why Mickey Rooney was allowed to play a very stereotypical Asian character in "Breakfast at Tiffany's", why most Americans thought all Asian women dressed like geisha girls, and so it's unclear what exactly resulted from dragging South American stereotypes into American culture through a camera lens. Americans probably thought that Brazilians just drink, dance and party all night, and this may have happened because the Disney artists and animators were encouraged to drink, dance and party all night.
I'm drawing the conclusion that there was no footage recorded on the trip, which seems like a shame. Obviously there were no cameraphones back then, and it was still in the days before video cameras, but couldn't someone have brought a Bolex or something and shot a few roles of film? Instead the director of "Walt & El Grupo" had to digitally manipulate some still images from the trip, and that just looks terribly cheesy. This film also kept falling back on having family members read letters written by the artists on the trip to their wives or kids back home. It's sweet in a way, but also an artistic cop-out. Walt got to bring his wife on the trip, but not his daughters, I'm not quite sure what to make of that. Some of the artists were married to each other, or maybe fell in love on the trip, I'm not sure, but then a few had to spend months away from home just for the sake of artistic research, communicating with family only by mail, what a drag.
Also starring Flavio Barroso, Lydia Bodrero, Harriet Burns, John Canemaker, Josefina Molina Chazarreta, Diane Disney, Blaine Gibson, Juan Carlos Gonzalez, J.B. Kaufman, Janet Lansburgh, Leticia Pinheiro, Andres Chazarreta Ruiz, Cindy Sears, Jeannette Thomas, with archive footage of Lee Blair, Mary Blair, James Bodrero, William Cottrell, Jack Cutting, Lillian Disney, Norman Ferguson, Larry Lansburgh, John Parr Miller, Herbert Ryman, Ted Sears, Webb Smith, Frank Thomas, Charles Wolcott, Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump".
RATING: 4 out of 10 terrible hats
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