1939’s Rio has five or six songs in it. I lost count after a while, so I’m not sure. I only know each song is more terrible than the one that preceded it. The strangest thing is this isn’t technically a musical.
The movie begins in England, where a group of excitable businessmen are waiting to learn if Basil Rathbone has secured a loan in Paris. He tells them he has, even if he hadn’t.
Following a suggestion made to him, he decides to try a radical approach: “Honesty. I’ve never tried that before. That could be my ace in the hole.” So, he tells the men holding his securities that most of them are forged. The only way they will possibly remain solvent is to help him secure this loan.
He leaves them to mull that over that while he takes his wife (Sigrid Gurie) to dinner. I found it odd she gets up to sing a number, when I didn’t think she was meant to be performing. Just imagine eating somewhere where a fellow diner suddenly stands up and starts singing. Even weirder, her husband is at a table, but she is facing away from him, singing to a statue. That’s how she happens to miss the police apprehending him. Behavior like this has to be a sign of trouble in a relationship.
He ends up doing time in a penal colony on an island off the coast of Brazil near, you guessed it, Rio. When we first see him, he is trying to rally his fellow prisoners into putting more effort into moving a giant fallen tree. I was reminded of that Far Side cartoon set in Hell where there’s a guy merrily whistling and a demon moaning about how he just can’t seem to get through to that guy.
For some reason, such behavior puts Rathbone on the shitlist of one of the guards. Gurie has been writing her husband a letter each week, but that guard ensures they never get to him. Without responses to his communiques, Rathbone starts suspecting his wife is becoming unfaithful.
Turns out he has reason to be concerned. Gurie had traveled all the way to Rio to be closer to her husband and has been singing in clubs. She has a meet cute with Robert Cummings, playing a disgraced engineer who has found solace in the bottle. Cummings will find redemption by building a dam that will save a town desperate for water. As a result of this, she will find herself falling in love with him.
Rathbone will escape from the island through the assistance of a reluctant accomplice he has dragged into his scheme (Irving Bacon). In what may be one of the coldest scenes I have witnessed in a movie from that era, it will turn out Rathbone’s plan all along had been to kill Bacon and switch ID tags with him, leaving the authorities to believe the wrong man escaped. Bacon doesn’t die immediately, leaving him to say something truly heartbreaking: “In a few years…I could have gone back…home.”
Waiting for Rathbone on shore is Victor McLaglen, an actor I am always happy to see. He’s likely best remembered as John Wayne’s contender for Maureen O’Hara’s heart in The Quiet Man. Here, he is an excessively dedicated henchman, to the extent I think it’s fair to say he is the Smithers to Rathbone’s Burns. I even wondered if there was some sort of coded subtext to how much he cares for the other man.
Other than those two, I found the performances lacking. Cummings would go onto far better things, but his performance here grated on my nerves a bit. I wonder why so many actors are unable to realistically portray a drunk on a bender. I know Cummings can’t.
Gurie is passable, though I felt she was going through the motions of a performance instead on inhabiting a role. I think she is largely here to sing the majority of the songs. If so, I wonder why they bothered, as she isn’t that good.
Even worse are Leo Carrillo and Billy Gilbert as the comic relief characters, though they aren’t given much to do that is actually funny. Especially bad is the song they do together, which is the nadir of the film.
Rio is an odd duck. It could have focused on Rathbone’s ruthless anti-hero or on the romance between Gurie and Cummings. Instead, it splits the difference and each storyline is weaker for it. Either storyline could have easily filled the 77 minute runtime, which makes it all the more curious the filmmakers chose to dilute the effort even further with the inclusion of several musical performances.
Dir: John Braham
Starring Basil Rathbone, Sigrid Gurie, Victor McLagen
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray