Carnival in Costa Rica (1947)

Here's another of those colorful yet mindless set-in-Latin-America musicals where flashily costumed principals and extras burst into high-spirited songs and dances at the drop of an embroidered serape. The story is as slight as passione con amore on ice – and played with as much expression as rigor mortis by pedestrian second-players like J. Carroll Naish and Pedro de Cordoba. Watching this movie is like drinking root beer with chili sauce, although the rest of the cast is pleasant enough. Even Cesar Romero is only half as ridiculous as he usually appears as he spends half of the film hiding his overwrought smile and vacuous face behind dark glasses. Dick Haymes is somewhat wooden as usual, but he doesn't come on for over half an hour. Fritz Feld is usually a pain, but he feeds some good lines here and makes an agreeable comic. Ratoff's direction is extremely skillful for once. My guess is the film editor stood as his side, as the editing is incredibly smooth. And the editor is no less than William H. Reynolds, regarded by both his peers and producers as one of the best three film editors of all time! Leonide Massine's choreography, for instance, particularly in the fiesta sequence, is quite dazzlingly colorful, and notice how brilliantly it is edited!

Cesar was 40 when this movie was made, at least a decade and a half older than the character should be for an arranged marriage. It appears they tried to hide his age via makeup and hair dye, but these ruses are as convincing as happy, dirt-free coffee-pickers singing their way through a day of hot drudgery. Having said that, this movie, seen in January 2007 on the Fox Movie Channel, is surprisingly watchable. The costumes and dancing and songs are easy on the eyes. Cesar may be too old to play a young buck dealing with parents trying to arrange a marriage, but he is still the great Cesar Romero, of later fame as "The Joker" on Batman.

I saw this movie in 1947 when it first was released. Mainly because I was a young dance student at that time and I wanted to see the great Leonide Massine, famous because of his discovery by Serge Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe. He replaced the great Vaslav Nijinsky. He appeared in this film during his latter years, but even so you can see what a great dancer he was.Unfortunately, the producers of this film did not really understand or appreciate his fame and greatness, or give him proper credit. He could have been just another studio dancer. Vera Ellen had a hard time keeping up with him during their only dance sequence.Interesting that Massine, who came from Moscow and was a Russian trained in the Russina ballet, became such a wonderful Spanish dancer.This seems to have been his forte and shows well in this film. A pity that I was too young to ever have seen him on the stage. But his choreography is continually revived by ballet companies the world over.

This is good to watch if only for Vera-Ellen, Celeste Holme, Ceasar Romero, J. Carrol Naish, Anne Revere, and especially, the great crooner Dick Haymes who had a marvelous voice and wasn't a bad actor either.....only the material was schlocky in this one. I would recommend Costa Rica use this for tourism!