BEFORE: Let's play two today, since I want to hit Valentine's Day tomorrow with the right film, and I want to squeeze an extra film into February, so I don't have to double-up as often in March (I want to hit the right film on Easter, also...) Fred Astaire carries over from "Daddy Long Legs".
Also, today is Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, an official holiday in both New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro - so tomorrow's also Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, and I want to get this Rio-based film in today and not tomorrow. I had to stay up very late to get another movie in, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
THE PLOT: An aviator and band leader who's always getting his group fired for his flirtatious behavior soon finds himself falling for an engaged woman.
AFTER: We're going way back tonight - back to 1933, which is ALMOST the oldest film on my watchlist. This is so far back that Fred and Ginger were not the lead actors in this film, they play sort of the secondary characters. The lead male is Roger Bond, the bandleader for the Yankee Clippers (Astaire just plays accordion and conducts when Roger's not available) and he falls for the Brazilian beauty, Belinha, while she's visiting the Miami hotel, where the band is playing, with her over-protective aunt. The band is under STRICT orders to not interact with the hotel's guests, that just wouldn't be proper - so, guess what happens? All the women wanted to be with bandleaders back in the 1930's, I guess, that was a thing, so what was he supposed to do, NOT dance with the guests?
Roger gets the band a new gig at a new hotel, only it's down in Rio de Janeiro. The whole band presumably flies coach down there, but Roger's got his own plane with room for another passenger (even though he's somehow got a piano on board, and also some kind of bed?) Wouldn't you know it, the lovely Belinha needs to return to Rio, and he maneuvers her onto his plane, then attempts to invent the "Mile-High Club". And when that doesn't work, he pulls the old "There's something wrong with the plane" trick and lands on a deserted island. (Yes, he says "deserted", not "desert", which is more correct, because you can't survive at all on a desert island, which would have no trees or water or food. But somehow over time "deserted" (no people) got corrupted to "desert" (no water)).
The two struggle with their consciences for a bit (represented by ghostly images of themselves) but they're kissing in the plane before long, and presumably huddled together for warmth to make it through the, umm, frigid tropical night. But it turns out they weren't as "stranded" as they thought they were, so the trip to Rio is back on. Let's just hope that another crazy coincidence won't get in the way of these two kids falling in love...
The Hays code was introduced in 1930, so I don't know how they got some of this film's material past the censorship board. (EDIT: Ah, it seems the Code wasn't fully enforced until 1934.) I'm thinking here about the hotel maid in the first scene, with ample cleavage making eyes at the hotel manager. (I didn't really understand this sequence, the maids are lined up for inspection by the manager, and after she makes eyes at him, he makes all the maids turn around and he looks at her shoes, or perhaps her stockings, sees something he doesn't like, but then he doesn't discipline her for it? I was very confused.) EDIT: Ah, apparently her heels were oddly rounded, and back in the 1930's, a "round-heeled" woman was slang for a prostitute, someone who could tilt from standing to being on her back very easily...
Then there was the line about the appeal of South Americans, when they visit the U.S. One of Belinha's friends wonders, "What do they have below the Equator that we haven't?" And if you take "below the Equator" to be a reference to "below the belt", this line is very racy indeed. At another point, the bandleader is mistaken for a drummer, then a piccolo player, and Belinha's aunt mishears this and thinks she's with a "gigolo" - could you even depict a gigolo in a 1933 movie? I guess so! Then we have Ginger Rogers singing a song about how music makes her lose her dignity, to do the things she never should do. Well, OK, thanks for the tip.
At this point, I wondered if even the line "see that the boys all have a dill pickle with their box lunch" was some kind of sex reference...
What Ginger Rogers will do, apparently, after she loses her dignity, is fly on the outside of a plane, in order to direct a bunch of dancers who are strapped to the outside of OTHER planes, to conduct some kind of aerial biplane ballet, that somehow entertains the patrons of a Brazilian casino/hotel, which prevents it from being taken over by a mysterious syndicate of rich monocled guys in tuxedos (they'd be holding giant bags of money with dollar signs on them, only that would be TOO obvious...)
I know that they didn't REALLY strap a bunch of dancers onto planes to make this film - the special effects are obviously just a bunch of rear-projection footage of Brazil behind the prop planes, because that would be WAY too many people to fit on a biplane - too much weight on the wings - and because often the plane is supposedly moving in a different direction from that implied by the movement of the background footage. Plus, how would they even get that shot, have another camera in another plane flying perfectly in sync?
What's really scandalous is the throwaway comments by those dancers (they say things like "I'll try anything once!") and the fact that at one point, some of their dresses are removed via parachutes, leaving them strapped to the biplane wings wearing very little - well, it is Brazil, after all - and some of them were wearing see-through blouses to begin with! That's a few more nipples than I thought I'd see in a black and white film from 1933, for sure. Too bad all of the hotel guests were on the ground, and the planes were much too high for the guests to even see the dancers.
In addition to introducing the team of Fred & Ginger to the world, this film also popularized the Carioca, a Brazilian dance where a man and woman scandalously touch their foreheads together while dancing. (Forehead-on-forehead action? How gauche!) And the lines of the song ask, "Say, have you seen the Carioca? It's not a foxtrot or a polka." Umm, thanks, I kind of figured out that it wasn't a polka - but you know that doesn't really rhyme, right? The song continues: "It has a meter that is tricky, a bit of wicked wacky-wicky..." Nope, you just can't make up words when you need something in a song to rhyme!
The singer here is Etta Moten, credited in the role of "The Colored Singer" (again, it was a different time) and she is seen wearing a basket on her head with fruit in it. Last year I watched "Scared Stiff" with Carmen Miranda in it, and I wondered about where her act came from, with the big hat full of fruit. I learned that this trend of trimming hats with fresh fruit went all the way back to 1918, but it caught on again when Carmen Miranda did a number called "The Girl in the Tutti Frutti Hat" in a 1943 film called "The Gang's All Here". But apparently she wasn't the first woman in film with a fruit basket hat, because Etta Moten did it in "Flying Down to Rio" ten years earlier!
The "Carioca" song was nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar. but it lost to a song from another Fred Astaire film - "The Continental", from the movie "The Gay Divorcee". And then many years later a comical version of the song played during the closing credits of "The Kentucky Fried Movie", with Jo Stafford singing off-key (under the pseudonym of Darlene Edwards).
Also starring Gene Raymond (last seen in "Mr. & Mrs. Smith"), Dolores del Rio, Ginger Rogers (last seen in "The Barkleys of Broadway"), Raul Roulien, Blanche Friderici (last seen in "It Happened One Night"), Walter Walker (last seen in "You Can't Take It With You"), Etta Moten, Paul Porcasi (last seen in "The Gay Divorcee"), Franklin Pangborn (last seen in "Carefree"), Eric Blore (last seen in "Shall We Dance"), Reginald Barlow, (last seen in "Horse Feathers") Roy D'Arcy, Maurice Black, Armand Kaliz, Clarence Muse, Eddie Borden (last seen in "Monkey Business"), Betty Furness (last seen in "Swing Time")
RATING: 4 out of 10 bellhops
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