Carnival in Costa Rica (1947)

Touches You

Too much of everything

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

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

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!

I found the movie humorous, fun and enjoyable but I can easily understand why my grandparents found it offensive. Being Costa Rican I have heard how the sections of the movie that were filmed in Costa Rica caused great commotion at the time even though none of the main actors came to the country (at least for filming). When the movie finally opened in Costa Rica people were upset of how the people and the country had been misrepresented. Even though the movie exerts attitudes and prejudices towards Latin America, as well as ignorance over the social and cultural differences between Latin American countries and Spain it reflects the ignorance (or innocence?) of the 1940s. At the end, for all the cultural improprieties doesn't make "Carnival in Costa Rica" any less enjoyable.

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.

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!