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Thanks for the memories!

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An Exercise In Nonsense

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

"Rio Rita" should be required viewing for all film studies classes--not as an example of quality, but as an exercise in identifying all the mistakes that were made in its production. In 1929, the nascent talkie industry was on a steep curve to understand and perfect the medium. They used former silent film stars. And they imported vaudeville acts, stage actors and opera stars--anyone with experience using his voice before audiences. And in this case, they imported an entire Broadway musical produced by Flo Ziegfeld. This film says as much about the sad quality of Broadway at the time as it does about Hollywood's first stumbling steps into the sound era. The good news is that the industry learned quickly and in only a few years, genuine classics were being produced in large quantities.In the meantime, some very uneven films were produced, like this one. It opens in Fremont, a small town along the Rio Grande, where cowboys in full western regalia rub elbows with men in tuxedos and flappers while watching a vaudeville-style act on a stage in the local saloon. Presumably the formally-attired swells in the audience rode their horses into town.Then the action crosses the river into Mexico, where the women who aren't dressed as flappers wear colorful fiesta wear and sombreros. Later, a scene takes place on a "pirate barge" parked on the southern side of the river. I am not making this up.I can say a couple of nice things about this pre-Code film. Some of the actors are attractive. After the criminals rob the local bank, they sing love songs in the garden of Senorita Rita's hacienda. And this film would be a rich vein for MST3000.As the singing Rangers search for the dangerous villain/bank robber known as "The Kinkajou", we can ask ourselves why a vicious bandit is named after a nocturnal arboreal mammal that eats mostly fruit? I guess "The Sloth" was already taken.We can also occupy our time enumerating the qualities of this film that leave much to be desired, like:*The sound quality. And I am not just referring to the aged quality of the sound. Dialogue competes with orchestral background music, for example.*The acting. Actors give speeches while the extras draw focus and otherwise look like planted palms around a stage.*The songs. There are some real stinkers in this collection. Consider: "Rootin' pals, tootin' pals..."*Costuming. Some of it looks amateurish. In other instances--as mentioned earlier--there are clashes of styles within the same scene.*Shaky camera work. They were still learning how to move cameras. Also, people's heads were cut off.*Bad singing. The voices are okay, but there is something wrong when a love song is delivered with the two vocalists generally ignoring each other.*Bad dancing, bad choreography. Here, I do not mean to single out this film. This was par for the course in all films of the time.*A disjointed mixing of genres. This film wants to be a musical, but it is also a western, an opera, a Ziegfeld extravaganza complete with aerial shots, a comedy including entire vaudeville acts dropped into the script. It also includes some tap dancing.On a positive note, I liked most of Dorothy Lee's performance as Dolly Bean, the woman who mistakenly weds a married man. She tries to rise above the material.

Early talkie with musical interludes. In Mexico people are looking for the bandit Kinkajou. Many people believe it is the brother of the lovely and popular Rio Rita (Bebe Daniels). Looking for him is dashing Captain Stewart (John Boles) and evil General Ravanoff (Georges Renavent). The "comedy" team of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey provide some astonishingly unfunny routines.Historically this is important. It was one of the first talkies and the last half hour is in color. But it's really pretty bad. The plot itself is creaky and the sound recording is terrible (but that can be excused). The songs and dancing themselves aren't bad (for 1929) but the movie is slow-moving and pretty boring. I find it hard to believe this movie was actually 30 minutes longer! Good acting doesn't help much. Also the comedy team of Wheeler and Woolsey pop up. They were pretty big in the 1920s and 30s but they're virtually unknown today. Considering their material in this I can see why! Their comedy is downright painful--I groaned aloud at some of the lines. It reached the point that I was fast forwarding through their "comedy" bits. To make things worse the final half hour is in very washed out color. So, film buffs might want to watch for historical purposes but it's a real long haul. I give it a 4.

When movies began to talk a whole new vista of motion pictures opened up with the musical. Not that musical properties hadn't been done before, most famously Rudolf Friml's Rose Marie was done as a silent film with Joan Crawford in the lead. The Student Prince was also done with Norma Shearer. But singing and dancing was something new and it's no accident that the first talking film, The Jazz Singer was a musical.The guy who made the best musicals back in those days was Florenz Ziegfeld. One of his best was the operetta Rio Rita which ran for 494 performances in 1927-1928. Since the setting was the west, to be exact the Texas-Mexican border, we essentially get the screen's first musical western.Rio Rita was the newly formed RKO Studios big budget film for 1929 and it starred John Boles and Bebe Daniels and Rio Rita was her talking picture debut. She surprised the world with a really nice soprano voice doing those Harry Tierney-Joseph McCarthy songs. Boles was one film's earliest singers and he does the famous Ranger song with gusto in the best Nelson Eddy manner. The other big song from the score was the title song that is sung as a duet with Boles and Daniels. Bebe's best solo number is an item that Tierney and McCarthy wrote specifically for the screen, You're Always In My Arms.Repeating their roles from the stage show are the comedy team of Wheeler and Woolsey who also make their screen debut as well. The team itself was a creation of Florenz Ziegfeld and he used them in one of his Ziegfeld Follies editions. They're involved in a subplot about playboy Wheeler getting a Mexican divorce and getting into the clutches of a shyster attorney in Woolsey. I could see that both of them were individual performers because Bert Wheeler gets himself a fine song and dance number in Out On The Loose. He was quite the dancer, something we rarely saw in his comedy films with Robert Woolsey. Still it was as a team that they have come down to us.The main plot involved Texas Ranger captain John Boles going across the border to ferret out and apprehend a bandit called El Kinkajou and finding romance with Bebe Daniels. Like the first version of Rose Marie though his main suspect is her brother and Texas Rangers like Canadian Mounties put duty first.The film is a photographed stage musical essentially, just like the first two Marx Brothers films, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers. But the opulence of a Ziegfeld Show is preserved and that is the main reason to see Rio Rita. The last half hour is in color and we can thank the Deity that was preserved. So for film historians and those who want a glimpse at the showmanship of Florenz Ziegfeld, don't miss Rio Rita when broadcast.

Though Rio Rita has a big reputation among aficionados, I think it's probably due more to its success as a stage vehicle than as a film.Nevertheless, for those who are interested in historical films, I feel Rio Rita serves as a good example of the kinds of obstacles that faced early film makers and actors. As the sound and music was recorded live, there are a number of mistakes, slips and awkward moments. But rather than detract, I think it's interesting to see how the actors and staff negotiated these difficulties. Particularly in the reprise of "Sweetheart We Need Each Other" you can see Dorothy Lee struggling to follow the conductor while Bert Wheeler keeps on distracting her, while Helen Kaiser is clearly trying to follow Lee but both Woolsey and Wheeler keep on getting in her way.Then there are moments that, because the recording was done live, are just over the top. The most hysterical moment has got to be when, after 5 minutes of singing and tap-dancing in a single take, and then after a series of double summersaults, Bert Wheeler literally jumps on Dorothy Lee's back and rides piggy-back while she resumes singing. Wow!And of course, with so few surviving films with two-strip Technicolor, it's always interesting to see how early film makers took advantage of it.