Holiday in Mexico (1946)

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

This is story of Walter Pidgeon the father, Jane Powell the daughter, and Roddy Mcdowall the boy after Jane. I love all three actors, but something is missing from this film. All three players take a Holiday in Mexico. Roddy Mcdowall is excellent and steals the film. He loves Jane Powell, but Jane is more interested in Jose Iturbi. Walter Pidgeon finds an old love from his past which causes Jane to be jealous. Every scene Roddy has is a delight, but many of the other scenes drag on too long. Walter and Jose talk about her crush and work out a plan to cure her crush. Walter has a real good scene with Jane in the end to help her get over her embarrassment for loving such an older man.

This is basically a bad movie, one in which the sum of the parts is definitely less than the parts themselves. It throws together without ever fusing them into one coherent whole 1) José Iturbi, who plays a Hollywood version of Rachmaninoff's Second Concerto for piano and Chopin's Military Polonaise, 2) Xavier Cougat and his orchestra doing what they did, 3) Ilona Massey being very beautiful and singing into the bargain, and 4) Jane Powell. Powell evidently couldn't act - though this script doesn't really provide any opportunity to do so - but she could sing light classical music, and in this movie she was given music to sing that really showed off her voice (Bizet's Les filles de Cadiz, Herbert's Italian Street Song, etc.). It serves as something of an explanation of what went wrong subsequently, when MGM and then RKO put Powell into movies where she was asked to sing the popular music of the era. She never sounded particularly at ease with the popular music, and never did a particularly good job of singing it. Since she wasn't an actress, when what she was singing wasn't interesting, there was nothing to attract audiences. But this movie shows that, had Hollywood continued to give her music appropriate to her voice, her later movies might not have been so forgettable. As it is, this movie is like a vaudeville show: it presents a series of well-done musical numbers connected, feebly, by a script that is best forgotten. If you like Iturbi, or Massey, or Powell, you'll like their numbers. (Did anyone really like Xavier Cougat?) You can go make popcorn during the rest of it and not miss anything.

If you have an hour and a half to kill and enjoy Jane Powell's singing and Walter Pidgeon's dashing good looks, this beats the heck out of watching this week's third installment of Dateline NBC. Seriously, the music is very good, the comedy is fast, and the sweetness is easy to take. Totally forgettable fluff, but an enjoyable way to pass time.

Now we know where Taco Bell got its idea for a talking chihuahua! During one of the overblown musical numbers by Xavier Cugat and His Orchestra, Cugat's chihuahua gets to look into the camera and speak his own lines -- in Spanish and English! Supposedly set in Mexico City, the film displays a marked lack of local color.