Going Down on Good Neighbours: Imagining America´ in Hollywood Movies of the 1930S and 1940S (Flying Down to Rio and Down Argentine Way)

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Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 71–84, 2010

Going Down on Good Neighbours: Imagining America´ in Hollywood Movies of the 1930s and 1940s (Flying Down to Rio and Down Argentine Way)

PHILIP SWANSON University of Shefﬁeld, UK

During the Good Neighbor Era of the 1930s and 1940s, the USA sought to normalise relations with Latin America in order to promote hemispheric unity, particularly so after the outbreak of the Second World War, which provoked anxiety about transatlantic trade routes and South American attitudes towards the Axis. An Ofﬁce of the Co- ordinator of Inter-American Affairs was established, which in turn set up a Motion Picture Division. The Division pressed for a Latin American specialist to monitor and control representations of Latin America via the Production Code Administration. The attempt to promote positive portrayals of Latin Americans assisted a boom in musical comedies dealing with North Americans visiting their southern neighbours. This article examines an early precursor, Flying Down to Rio (1933), and a full-blown Good Neighbor movie, Down Argentine Way (1940). The article uncovers, behind the optimistic projection of neigh- bourliness, hidden tensions and deep-rooted anxieties about American identities.

Keywords: American identities, Argentina, Brazil, Good Neighbor Era, Hollywood, musical comedy.

The opening lines of Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters’ 1946 hit song, ‘South America, Take it Away’, from the musical Call Me Mister, go as follows. Bing sings:

Up here in the land of the hot-dog stand, the atom bomb and the Good Humor Man, We think our South American neighbors are grand. we love ’em to beat the band.

© 2009 The Author Journal compilation © 2009 Society for Latin American Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 71 Philip Swanson

The lyrics continue, as the Andrews Sisters intervene, as follows: South America, baba-loo, baba-loo, ay-ee-eh, baba-loo, one favor you can do, ay-ee-eh, you can do. You beautiful lands below, don’t know what you began. To put it plainly, I’m tired of shakin’ to that Pan-American plan.

Take back your Samba, ay!, your Rumba, ay!, your Conga, ay-yi-yi!, I can’t keep movin’, ay!, my chassis, ay!, any longer, ay-yi-yi! Now maybe Latins, ay!, in their middles, ay!, are built stronger, ay-yi-yi!, but all this takin’ to the quakin’ and this makin’ with the shakin’ leaves me achin’, ole!´ In a sense, this ambiguous and even contradiction-laden song captures the spirit of the so-called Good Neighbor Era in the USA, beginning in the 1930s and culminating and ending in the 1940s: it evokes an exotic yet sinister cocktail of admiration, attraction and desire mixed with patronising snobbery and underlying sexual, moral, ethnic and political anxiety. The Good Neighbor Era has its roots in the Great Depression and, in particular, the outbreak and course of the Second World War. US concerns about transatlantic and transpacific supplies and markets led to a refocusing of attention on the neighbours to the south and the urgent evolution of policies to shore up hemispheric unity in unpredictable times. Moreover, pressed by Nelson Rockefeller, following Germany’s invasion of France, President Franklin Roosevelt established in 1940 the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, designed to shore up and regularise cultural relations across the Americas in order to try and ensure a united front against the Axis. Rockefeller, as Head of the new agency, appointed John Hay ‘Jock’ Whitney as chief of its Motion Picture Division. Whitney sought to control representations of Latins1 and Latin America in Hollywood movies. The popularity of Latin stars and the so- called ‘Latin Look’ in the 1920s and early 1930s had, unsurprisingly, begun to decline somewhat with the arrival of the talkies. A process of de-Latinisation crept in, the most notorious example of which is probably the reincarnation of Margarita Carmen Cansino (daughter of a Spanish dancer and player of Mexican senoritas˜ in sundry B movies) into Rita Hayworth in her first major hit The Strawberry Blonde (1941) – a remarkable stroke of de-ethnicisation. Even those successful films from the period that were on Latin American themes, such as Viva Villa! (1934) and Juarez (1939), employed browned-up North Americans to play the leads. To generate the attempted illusion of reversing this trend, Whitney relied on the manipulation of the Production Code Administration, which had been set up in the early 1930s mainly to self-regulate the inclusion of sexually dubious material in the movies, but which eventually could effectively be invoked to bar any film perceived as offensive – including on the grounds of defamation of foreign nationals or their cultures. Under pressure from Whitney, the Production Code Administration’s Head, Will Hays, appointed a Latin American specialist, Addison

1 The term ‘Latin’ came to be used in Hollywood in the early twentieth century to refer to both Latinos/as in the USA and Latin Americans. It was even occasionally used to refer to people from other countries such as Spain or Italy, especially in the term ‘Latin Lover’.

Durland, to regulate movies so as to remove negative portrayals and foster instead positive images of the US’s Latin American neighbours. With Hollywood locked into a powerful studio system such regulation quickly became eminently enforceable.2 However, North American versions of Latinity were often highly problematic. The attempt to present Latin America positively frequently generated a limited and over-prosperous rendering of the region, projected in terms of the aspirations of a cosmopolitan white elite. More seriously, the most striking Latin American characters in the films of the period were often either presented as exotic or comical: charming, fun, to be played with or desired, but always irretrievably ‘other’. And perhaps the unconscious heart of this projection of a sexually marked Latinity was the deep association of the South with repressed, dark, libidinal urges, to be flirted with but kept at a distance – the beginnings of a process in which Latinity, in film and consumer culture more widely, would come to stand for the unconscious of the North or the West, the necessary other side of the discipline of capitalism and Protestant morality.3 Despite official policies, Latin American identities were essentially either collapsed into a largely undifferentiated pan-Latinness or reduced to the raw material for the exploration of North American heroisms, fantasies and national myths. An example of the sort of film that thrived during the Good Neighbor Era was the musical comedy. Obviously, such musicals could showcase Latin Americans as lively and happy, sexy and spectacular – the sort of people you could have a good time with or just gawp at in awe. Indeed, virtually all of the big Latin stars to emerge in North America on the back of this phenomenon embodied these characteristics: performers such as Carmen Miranda, Xavier Cugat, Cesar Romero and Desi Arnaz.4 At the same time, though, the high-society romance context for these films disingenuously suggested that, on another level, Latin and North Americans were really not different – hence they could fall in love and marry with social stability unthreatened. The unresolved tension between erasing and highlighting difference is pretty much a constant in these pictures and emphasises the brooding social and political anxieties underlying these apparently straightforward and cheerful celebrations of Inter-American relations. Two films involving Americans going ‘down South’ in search of love, adventure and sheer pleasure will serve as illustrations of the genre: first, an early and prototypical escape fantasy, Flying Down to Rio (1933); and then a more conscious case of the Good Neighbor model, Down Argentine Way (1940). These two examples bring out the gradual shift from informally internalised and loosely-held assumptions about the Americas to a more structured and codified policy-driven approach that appears to normalise such internalisation.

2 The best introduction to ‘Latin Hollywood’ is Rodrıguez´ (2004). Also useful are: Hadley-Garcıa´ (1990) and Reyes and Rubie (2000). Much of the background infor- mation here is drawn from Rodrıguez´ (2004). Other more broad-ranging works useful for Latin cinema in the context of the Good Neighbour Era include: Friedman (1991) and Bernardi (2001). A helpful theoretically-inflected reflection on the way cinema creates as well as reflects transnational forces (here in the specifically US – Mexican context) is Fein (2003). See also, on postcolonial readings of inter-American relations more generally, Joseph, Legrand and Salvatore (1998). 3 An interesting gloss on this idea is the concept of ‘viral latinidad’ as developed by Beasley-Murray (2003). 4 The pattern of accentuation and capitalisation (even, on occasion, spelling) of names and references tended to be anglicised in Hollywood.

Flying Down to Rio was an RKO picture, directed by Thornton Freeland, and produced by Merian C. Cooper (of King Kong fame) and Lou Brock. The film was originally conceived as a vehicle for Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio, who had become a major star in the 1920s. Increasingly known for her aura of cool glamour by the early 1930s, in this film she still cuts a striking figure for the modern viewer and caused a sensation at the time by introducing the two-piece swimsuit to the screen in one of the film’s Brazilian scenes. Nonetheless, the movie remains famous today largely for other reasons. The astounding finale is one: it is an extraordinary aerial dance routine in which showgirls perform while strapped on to the wings of a series of aeroplanes. The film also marked the first pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, both playing supporting characters here. The 22 – year-old Rogers was only brought into the film following an affair between the original actress, Dorothy Jordan, and the producer, Cooper, but, already established, she had billing above Astaire. The Rogers and Astaire pairing was such a hit that they went on to make nine more films together (with Fred enjoying top billing in all of them). One of the film’s most memorable sequences is the dance routine featuring them in a Rio cabaret performing to the tune of ‘The Carioca’. ‘Flying Down to Rio’ (the music for the aeroplane routine) was supposed to be the film’s showpiece number, but ‘The Carioca’ actually landed a Best Song Oscar nomination and became a smash hit and dance craze in the USA. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy (which he inherited from Herbert Hoover when he took over as President in the year of Flying Down to Rio’s release) had not yet, in 1933, led to the sort of extensive formal control of film representations of Latin America that would become the norm by the end of the decade. It is not surprising therefore that Freeland’s movie is very North American in its values and focus. Though there are some comic Latin American stereotypes on offer here, the difference between North and South – at least in the presentation of the principals – is somewhat fudged. There are only two major Brazilian characters, Del Rio’s Belinha de Rezende5 and her character’s fiance´ Julio Ribeiro (Raul Roulien). These are both upper-class individuals and not really that different from their North American equivalents. Indeed, Del Rio’s public image was consciously de-Mexicanised in the late 1920s to early 1930s; her light skin (described as ‘silky beautiful’ and of the ‘palest cafe´ au lait’) allowing her to project an ‘aristocratic bearing’ (Carr, 1979: 20, quoted in Rodr´ıguez, 2004: 58–59). Moreover, the white blond male lead from North America (Gene Raymond as band leader Roger Bond) wins the woman away from his Latin rival. In any case, his Rio-based rival is actually his best friend: their unlikely friendship is never explained and the differences between them are elided. The love plot actually allows for a rather intriguing inversion of the sort of stereotypes that would take hold more strongly by the end of the decade. Bond falls for Belinha while she is a guest at the Hibiscus Hotel in Miami, where his band, the Yankee Clippers, is performing. The orchestra loses its contract because of Bond’s indiscretion with a client and takes up an invitation instead to play at the grand opening of the Hotel Atlantico in Rio de Janeiro (then the capital of Brazil). Coincidentally, the hotel is being launched by Belinha’s father and she returns to Rio to be with him (after a flirtatious night under the stars with Bond on the journey south). It is when Bond arrives in Rio that we learn that his best friend is engaged to the woman with whom he has fallen in love. However, the

5 The casting of a Mexican as a Brazilian, of course, indicates a lack of real sensitivity to the speciﬁcity of identities.

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Society for Latin American Studies 74 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 29, No. 1 Imagining America´ in Hollywood Movies emphasis is not on an uptight Anglo being swept off his feet by the libidinous charms of a sultry Latin temptress. If anything, the fantasy of North American identity asserted here suggests that the North Americans are free and easy while the South Americans are repressed and tied to tradition. Belinha is initially protected from contamination by ‘American customs’ by her stern aunt, Elena, while Roger is characterised as a happy-go-lucky adventurer with a roving eye (hence the seeming inappropriateness of their union to the aunt). Belinha is repeatedly linked to notions of discipline and reserve, commenting at one stage: ‘Things are different down here in Brazil. We belong to our families and our promises, even though all we want in the world is beautiful, crazy happiness.’ And when a sparky American woman advises Julio simply to run off with Belinha, he retorts: ‘In Brazil, we do not elope.’ Tellingly, when the two friendly rivals discuss their dilemma, Bond suggests: ‘Shall we let nature take its course?’ ‘Nature, and common sense’, replies Julio. ‘I’ll just stick to nature’, counters Bond. North America, rather than the tropics, is the territory of instinct and sexual freedom, it appears. This fantasy is reinforced by the concentration on the minor characters and their down-to-earth, almost proletarian, values. It is not surprising that Fred and Ginger stole the show, because they, along with the other band members, encapsulate the idea that authentic American identity lies in the cheeky, irreverent, wise-cracking world of the common man. Their characters, Fred Ayres and Honey Hale, are saucy but salt of the earth – and they are the ones who get down on the dance floor to do the sexy carioca, not the principal lovers. The language and imagery of the film is often strikingly sexual, made as it was before the introduction of the Production Code Administration’s strictures on decency. Honey is pretty straightforward in her sexual innuendos and implied availability. When the stuffy Miami hotel manager, Franklin Pangborn’s Hammerstein (imported from Switzerland to impose discipline), warns he will not tolerate familiarity with the guests, Honey raises her skirt above her leg and asks: ‘What happens if the guests get familiar with us?’ Indeed this sequence follows on from one where Hammerstein inspects the team of chamber maids. He is taken aback by the exposed cleavage and brazen winking of one of the girls and shocked by the worn-down heels of another (implying her regular willingness to lie back and accommodate!). The scene is echoed in the spunky daring of the assorted rough and ready girls Fred and Honey round up for the (risque´ and risky) finale. Ordinary girls are also unsurprisingly receptive to the carioca. The dance involves Latin couples rubbing their foreheads together. When Fred jokes that this is a case of ‘mental telepathy’, Honey quips that she ‘can tell what they’re thinking about from here’. Fred and the other band members are also associated with a healthy disrespect for the law. There is much mention of the law in this film (Julio’s lame excuse for not eloping is that, ‘it is against the law’). The Americans’ openness to challenge the law is essential to the film’s resolution. A crooked gambling syndicate has ensured that the authorities deny Belinha’s father an entertainment permit with a view to ruining his grand opening and sinking the hotel’s chances of success. Bond, who is also a keen aviator, comes up with the idea of an aerial spectacle above the hotel, while the wise-guy band members smuggle their instruments into the hotel and strike up the music before anyone can stop them. There is an interesting earlier moment when the Brazilian police turn up to ban the rehearsals Fred is leading. Fred’s instinct is to do what he says they do in his country and slip them some cash. A horrified Belinha points out that bribery might well be acceptable in America, but that it is a certain prison offence in Brazil. Needless to say, the plucky Americans win the day: the final image is not of the main lovers, but a tipsy Fred and Honey downing cocktails after their triumph over the syndicate.

Yet behind the populist celebration of audacious American vigour, certain inconsistencies and anxieties lurk. When Belinha first catches Roger’s eye, Fred remarks to the band: ‘Hold your hats boys. Here we go again. A Latin type!’ The spectre of Latin sexuality’s implicit threat to order is thus invoked. One of the American girls at Belinha’s table, disappointed that the Brazilian gets the much-coveted band leader, sulkily exclaims: ‘What have these South American girls got below the Equator that we haven’t?’ Moreover, the manager of the Rio nightclub’s championing of the carioca highlights a perceived drab conventionalism in Anglo-American culture. When the local orchestra asks, in honour of the club’s American visitors,6 ‘Shall we play them a foxtrot?’, the crowd shout out: ‘No, we want the Carioca!’ Faced with Fred’s bafflement at the rejection of the popular American dance, the manager explains: ‘The American foxtrot is considered too tame, too dull. Our people prefer the carioca.’ A burst of brilliant energy erupts as the erotic dance fills the screen in a series of set pieces. The dismayed American band members wonder how they can ever compete. One comments: ‘Boy, no wonder it never gets cold in this country!’ The raw sexuality of some of the black dancers and the appearance of black singer Etta Moten (wearing what seems to be a basket of fruit on her head, she anticipates the popularity of Carmen Miranda) reinforce the cliche´ of tropical excess and throw the implied drabness of America into relief.7 Indeed there are strong suggestions that Belinha herself is not as reserved as she claims. It is she who seduces Roger Bond initially, commenting as she makes eyes at him that ‘whenever a Brazilian girl starts something, she must finish it’. At the heart of this film, then, there appears to be a subterranean anxiety over North American identity and power: both are confidently asserted yet immediately problematised. A key sequence is the one on a deserted tropical island, where Bond is forced to land his plane and spend the night with his passenger Belinha. The two are torn between desire and convention, and this is played out in the conversations they each have with their double (representing their unconscious or other side). One side of Belinha says, ‘I must keep my reserve’, while the other comes back with: ‘If people knew you as I do, they might be a little bit shocked’. Is this the secret association of Latinity with sexual laxity and a projection of a male fantasy of female desire? Interestingly, Bond’s alter ego advises him to use music to seduce her (and we later see her shaking with unexpressed yearning when the tune he composes that night, ‘Orchids in the Moonlight’,8 is played in a Rio club). Yet the seductive power of music is

6 The visitors are described as being ‘from our sister continent’, an obvious early nod to the Good Neighbor concept. 7 The confusion or complexity of apparent racial stereotyping is brought out in a bizarre scene on the tropical island where Roger and Belinha are temporarily marooned. A terriﬁed Belinha runs away screaming ‘Wild men!’ and ‘Cannibals!’ when she spots some bare-chested black men appearing from what looks like the jungle. However, when one of them speaks, he has a cod-posh English accent and turns out to be a very polite and helpful member of Haiti’s Port-au-Prince Golf Club. The mixture of stereotyping and questioning of them is hard to unravel, as is the positioning of notions of ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’ in relation to the identities of the Americas. For more on this last point, see Swanson (2003). 8 Moonlight is a key element of mise-en-scene` in the romantic comedy, especially in romantic settings (the tropical island here or the pampa in Down Argentine Way). Even modern revisionist romantic comedies such as Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck (1987) continue to play on this trope (Jeffers McDonald, 2007). The imagery of exotic moonlit

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Society for Latin American Studies 76 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 29, No. 1 Imagining America´ in Hollywood Movies actually associated in the film with tropical Latinity. The carioca gets everyone aroused (‘Kinda hot, babe. Let’s try some of that’, Fred says), and, echoing the orchid song, Belinha is described as an orchid – ‘bewitching, intoxicating, devastating’. Moreover, the title song alludes to ‘flying down to Rio where there’s rhythm and rhyme’, a place ‘where the lovely Brazilian ladies will catch your eye’. Rather unsubtly, the troupe of Brazilian carioca dancers is called ‘The Yes Girls’. The loss of control in the face of Latin temptation is tempered, though, by a discourse of usurpation and power. Fred and Ginger take over the dance floor during the carioca and, at the end, it is the American band (earlier unnerved by their inability to match the music of the carioca) that saves the day, their aerial dance spectacular presumably intended to be seen as trumping the native display in the carioca club. All of this is rammed home by a, for the contemporary viewer, rather startling sequence on the deserted tropical beach, when, in the face of Belinha’s resistance, Bond puts her across his knee and spanks her bottom – eliciting a curious look on her face of surprise mixed with pleasure. It is the North Americans who come out on top in the end. Indeed the music and choreography, with their anticipation of Busby Berkeley, are fundamentally North American in style throughout. North American music and dance are ultimately an assertion of Northern supremacy. But, again, this is a fantasy. This glamorous and jolly musical fun in which all ends well is actually taking place against the backdrop of the Great Depression (not that one would guess this from watching the film). Hence the foregrounding of Fred and Honey, the down-at-heel but worldly bandsmen and the game all-American showgirls. Poor ordinary Americans, the very people upon whose labour or sacrifice the system depends, are extended the compliment of embodying a national and continental spirit of can-do resilience – although the reality of the human experience beyond the silver screen may be quite different. Despite the populist thrust of Flying Down to Rio, with its gestures towards proletarian, black and female experience, the ending simply reasserts prevailing social hierarchies: the black dancers and singers are nowhere to be seen, Fred is together with his social equal Honey and implicitly left behind to clean up after the party, the Latin lover Julio jumps from the plane, and the handsome high-class couple are married and flying off to a new life together. In a sense, music and romance are a kind of leveller in this movie, bringing together different social classes and different ethnic and regional groups. Nonetheless, as many North Americans going South would themselves experience in real life, this is no more than a holiday romance, a brief flirtation. As in so many Hollywood films, such as, for instance, 1940’s The Philadelphia Story or its musical remake High Society (1956), the disorderly frisson of attraction across the social divide plays out dangerous desire, but ultimately order must be restored and everyone must marry accordingly and, in the end, know their place. Down Argentine Way was a Twentieth Century Fox production, directed by Irving Cummins and produced by the legendary Darryl F. Zanuck. The film was something of

backdrops is also central, of course, to Spanish American modernismo, as inaugurated by Nicaragua’s Ruben´ Darıo´ (1867–1916), a style of poetry also often linked to ideas of romanticism, escapism and surface aestheticism. See, for example, Jrade (1998). More recently, of course, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes’ 1982 play Orquıdeas´ a la luz de la luna (Orchids in the Moonlight), a meditation on the construction of identity and sexuality, is full of references to cinema and the memory of Dolores del Rio. Interestingly, the etymology of the word ‘orchid’ is ‘testicle’, perhaps not entirely insigniﬁcant in a ﬁlm and a play partly about unconscious sexuality.

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 29, No. 1 77 Philip Swanson a movie milestone for a number of reasons: it was the big break that really launched the career of future Forces heart-throb Betty Grable; it was the first in a series of Technicolor musicals from Fox featuring Grable and co-star Don Ameche9;andit marked the introduction to film audiences of the Brasileira or ‘Brazilian Bombshell’, Carmen Miranda. The story concerns horse-loving blonde American heiress Glenda Crawford, who falls for wealthy Argentine horse-breeder’s son Ricardo Quintana, and the action alternates from chic Manhattan to high-society Buenos Aires. Glamour and good fortune are at the centre of this film, then, with its beautiful costumes and settings of glitzy hotels, high-class night clubs and posh gatherings of horse lovers. Yet the narrative explicitly dates itself as 1940 – but there is no hint of war and no whiff of economic jitteriness. South America is thus an escape from reality. The Oscar nominated title song, conjures up an experience of tango and kisses: Underneath the pampas moon, when you hum a happy tune and kiss your cares goodbye. You’ll find your life will begin the very moment you’re in Argentina. If you’re a romantic senor˜ , then you will surely adore Argentina. Latin American escape is implicitly linked here to the promise of sexual pleasure. The song continues suggestively: You’ll be as gay as can be, if you will learn to S´ıS´ı like a Latin. and: You’ll steal a kiss, and then, if she should say, ‘Manana’,˜ it’s just to let you know you’re going to meet again. Indeed, after the song is first sung, Glenda is seen falling for the romantic passionate talk of Ricardo, in counterpoint to the language of her formal North American fiance,´ Jimmy, who is staidly discussing finances at a nearby table. Following a mix-up typical of the romantic comedy in which Glenda thinks her errant suitor has betrayed her, she later snaps, referring to Jimmy, that ‘he always keeps his engagements’ – an allusion to the dependability of rational Northern man, but with an underlying suggestion of longing for Latin looseness. Of course, the attraction of the Latin is too strong and Glenda soon finds herself heading down Argentine way in what is clearly presented as an unconscious (if obvious)

9 Ameche, it should be noted, is not of Latin descent. He was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to an Italian immigrant father and a mother of Irish and German background. Reyes and Rubie (2000) is a useful source for biographies of Hispanic actors in Hollywood.

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Society for Latin American Studies 78 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 29, No. 1 Imagining America´ in Hollywood Movies attempt to hook up again with Ricardo and the freedom he represents. The plot driver for the romance is to do with horses. ‘They have wonderful horses in South America’, one character says. Ricardo has come to New York to try and sell some of his father’s thoroughbreds at the Tuxedo Horse Show, and the couple fall for each over a bout of symbolic horse trading. However, Ricardo is forced to renege on his deal to sell to Glenda when he discovers her surname and realises that she is the daughter of his father’s mortal enemy, Willis Crawford. A bemused Glenda decides to escape New York and go horse-hunting abroad, choosing Argentina presumably in the hope that she will be reunited with Ricardo. The implications of her leaving behind the staid Jimmy to go looking for an Argentine thoroughbred are obvious. The dialogue fizzes with sexual horseplay from the start. When Glenda first spots the horse she wants being ridden by Ricardo at the show, she comments: ‘Wonderful, isn’t he?’ Her sharp aunt, Binnie, retorts: ‘You mean the man or the beast?’ The subliminal prospect of Latin animalism is reinforced by Binnie’s follow-up question: ‘You’re not thinking of buying that animal, are you?’ When the couple seal the deal over a romantic cocktail on the veranda of the Westchester, the sense of previously unknown pleasures to be found in the passionate men of the south is saucily encapsulated in Glenda’s remark: ‘I’ve bought many horses in the past, but I’ve never done it this way.’ However, the horse imagery later develops in a way that complicates the basic association of the South with instinctive, sensual, animal pleasure. It turns out that Ricardo’s father, Don Diego, now only rears jumping rather than racing horses. In a sense, the macho horse breeders have been emasculated ever since the death of aptly named race horse Tempestad in that the weakened patriarch no longer has the stomach for the hard world of flat racing. Glenda and the humble but wily peones on Diego’s estancia, on the other hand, can perceive the wastefulness of holding back Tempestad’s grandson, the equally well named Furioso, from his natural urge to race. After the horse’s startling performance at a race secretly organised by the peons at a local fiesta, Glenda manages to persuade a shocked and nervous Ricardo to defy his father and train Furioso to race. Furioso’s eventual triumph at the Argentine Handicap at San Isidro Park provides the climax to the film: the angry father, outraged by his son’s dalliance with a Crawford, is won over and the couple’s relationship is now legitimised. Despite his association with Latin passion, the suggestion is that the posh, sanitised rich boy Ricardo has lost touch with his animal side: he needs to stop being a dandy show jumper and liberate his inner racer. Hence, Glenda is an agent of change who prompts Ricardo to stop submitting to his aristocratic father and follow the cue of his earthy gaucho-like farmhands, releasing the true raw power of his own throbbing Latin manhood symbolised in the thrusting strength of Furioso. Now, the combined influence of Freud, Bakhtin and Northrop Frye would probably lead many theorists of comedy and film to read this outcome in celebratory, even sub- versive, terms. Indeed they would almost certainly be partially right to do so. Kathleen Rowe, for example, emphasises: comedy’s antiauthoritarianism – its attack on the Law of the Father and drive to level, disrupt and destroy hierarchy, to comment on and contest the values tragedy affirms. Comedy breaks taboos and expresses those impulses which are always outside social norms....Comedy, in contrast to tragedy, inflects the Oedipal story that underlies most narratives by shifting the son’s guilt to the father. Youth (the small, the petty and the powerless) triumphs over old age (authority, repression and the law), and the happy ending fulfils the son’s transgressive desires. (Rowe, 1995: 43–44)

This echoes Frye’s ideas on the utopian nature of comedy as a force of social renewal or transformation and even Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque as a release from repressive norms. In the final frame the loving couple are photographed against an idyllic, magical and fundamentally imaginary (rather than concretely realistic) background to the accompaniment of soaring music: they are in Frye’s utopian ‘order that is altered’, beyond the realm of everyday life (Frye, 1957; and see Rowe, 1995: 47). Not only have barriers of age, society and nation been dissolved, so too perhaps have those of ethnicity and class. The original challenge to Don Diego’s authority after all came from his shabby workers, who secretly trained Furioso and thus opened the way for Ricardo to overcome parental deference and discover his inner stallion. By the end, the faithful old gaucho-like retainer, Casiano, openly confronts his master about the horse race and is effectively responsible for Furioso’s triumph (the race has been rigged by unscrupulous jockey-switching, but Casiano has trained the horse so well that he follows the peon’s instructions and wins anyway). The finale is a carnivalesque musical tour-de-force in which everyone gets together, with Anglos and Latins happily dressing up in gaucho-style clothes and singing and dancing freely (even the black dance act, the Nicholas Brothers, who appeared in an earlier night-club sequence, turn up and join in). The final reprise of a running song emphasises the dissolution of binary division as ‘perfect strangers’ who were ‘worlds apart’ are now ‘so close’ that ‘two ... hearts’ become ‘one’. Of course, this final resolution is exactly what the North American censors actually wanted to achieve: the foregrounding of the politically and economically beneficial idea that the two regions were not so different after all, echoed in the parallel framing of romantic encounters on the veranda of the Westchester and the balcony of the El Tigre. Yet all this depends on denial (Argentina was often seen as pro-Axis and continued to show German films and newsreels during the War10) and on erasure of real difference (the similarities are only really between cultural and economic elites). There may be an element of subversiveness in making a woman the motor of change. Certainly, Glenda is projected as feisty and independent-minded; and it is she who sees the potential of Furioso, motivates the hero’s challenge to authority and ultimately faces down Don Diego. However, her apparent independence is predicated on her actual dependency on her father’s wealth, and she ends up in a conventional relationship of high-society equals. Indeed her rebellion is little more than a typical trope of screwball comedies of the 1930s.11 She is the characteristic madcap heiress on the run who shakes up a male opposite and ushers in the possibility of ‘impulsive vitality’ (Gollin, 1992: 127). The big difference, though, is that unlike, say, Frank Capra’s foundational screwball comedy It Happened One Night (1934), the male is most definitely not from a different social class, and Glenda’s experience of a local village fiesta hardly compares to the re- education of Claudette Colbert’s Ellie Andrews in Capra’s film via her famous encounter with down-home values on buses and in cheap boarding houses in her cross-country adventure with Clark Gable’s Peter Warne.

10 Argentina was technically neutral throughout most of the Second World War, and was an Allied power by its end. For more on the complexities of the situation, see, for example, Rock (1993). 11 For a good account of the screwball comedy and romantic comedy more generally, see Jeffers McDonald (2007).

As for the carnivalesque moments in Down Argentine Way, the Bakhtinian position that carnivalesque behaviour subverts symbolic hierarchies by exposing them as arbitrary constructs rather than immutable givens can obviously be challenged by the claim that the culture based on such hierarchies, by authorising and controlling such behaviour, uses carnival as ultimately a constraining force. As Susan Purdie says, ‘carnival, in inverting symbolic hierarchies, also reinscribes them; to create a socially low person as ‘‘King for the Day’’ in fact assumes that a ladder of social disadvantage is an eternal truth, and its carnivalesque nature asserts that this embodiment of the ladder is correct’ (Purdie, 1993: 12612). Indeed, in the carnivalesque moments in the present movie, it is always the wealthy North Americans who are at centre stage. Notable here is the role of the adventure-seeking middle-aged aunt Binnie Crawford, engagingly played by Charlotte Greenwood. Regularly enjoying the frisson of proximity to a bit of Latin rough, her first stirring rendition of ‘Sing to your Senorita’˜ occurs in a village fiesta in which she is the one enjoying the thrill of getting down with the locals, but with her also becoming (literally, in terms of framing) the centre of attention. Her later rendition of the song in another fiesta setting is actually an upper-class party in which the wealthy elite have appropriated the costumes and dances of the common folk for their own entertainment ends. What is more, in that same party, part of the film’s musical finale, Betty Grable’s character becomes the focus of attention, as she performs in ‘Latin’ dress and even usurps the song performed earlier by Carmen Miranda, ‘Mama Yo Quiero’. Betty Grable may be a woman, not a man; but, regardless of gender, what is happening here is that North America is displacing South America as the emotional, ideological, figurative (and in terms of filmic framing) literal centre of the movie. Moreover, despite the ‘good neighbourly’ intentions of the film, most of the Latin American characters remain irredeemably ‘other’. They are essentially comic turns: the scruffy, clumsy, put- upon peons such as Casiano, Esteban and Panchito; the dopey, corpulent, narcoleptic chauffeur Anastasio; the venal, bungling, squint-faced escort Tito. Much fun is had at their expense via a series of linguistic jokes (unsurprisingly, the exaggeratedly accented Casiano and Tito are played not by Latin but North Americans, J. Carrol Nash and Leonid Kinskey13). Moreover, they are fundamentally presented as untrustworthy and grasping. Many of the humorous Latin American characters are portrayed as desperate to squeeze some advantage out of the visiting Americans, most notably the guide Tito who is repeatedly given lines that speak of nepotism and shady dealings. At one point, when Glenda realises (following a comic misunderstanding) that her escort for the night, Tito, is a self-employed ‘tour guide’ rather than, as mistakenly thought, an Ambassador, she responds to his invitation to dance with a patronising: ‘Why not? ... We might as well get my money’s worth.’ This is doubly ironic, for a key element in the rescuing of the high-society romance via the Furioso affair is the fact that the families make a killing on betting on the horse. Jimmy’s money-centred North American capitalism is at the core of things after all. The patronising gaze is, inadvertently, a key feature of the film. The rich couple, as the dialogue frequently underscores, are regularly absorbed in each others eyes, while the camera roves fetishistically over the colourful bodies of performing Latins, as in the sequence where a group of peasant-like entertainers appear to serenade passively

12 For more on this aspect of comedy in a Latin American context, see Swanson (1995). 13 Kinskey was born in St Petersburg, Russia.

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 29, No. 1 81 Philip Swanson the starry-eyed lovers who are absorbed in each other’s gaze. Many of the fiesta or dance sequences reproduce an implicitly anthropologising gaze as the camera dwells, for instance, on performing bodies in costumbrista dress or gaudily clad bongo players. A key passage here is the segment set in the El Tigre nightclub in which Carmen Miranda (as herself) performs direct to camera. Miranda – the only Latin American to appear in the opening credits – was filmed separately for these scenes in a New York night club where she was under contract. Displayed in a frontal shot for the consumption of the club and film audience’s gaze and re-inscribing essentially foreign notions of tropical identity, she appears in her characteristically showy and bright headgear and performs her sexy but fundamentally comic routine. The popular song ‘I, Yi, Yi, Yi, Yi (I Like You Very Much)’ in which she uses her famous phrase ‘In Souse American Way’, is little more than a sell-out to comic cliches´ of Latin linguistic limitation mixed with a heady hint of sexual availability. Critics have read Miranda in terms of ‘her personification as the ultimate Latin American ‘‘other’’ in this era of ‘‘good neighbours’’’ (Lopez,´ 1991; and see Rodr´ıguez, 2004: 85), the sort of person ‘with whom North Americans could sing, dance, and flirt – though they did not end up marrying them’ (Rodr´ıguez, 2004: 83). The point is that, no matter what the efforts of the Motion Picture Division, the perspective here is profoundly ‘othering’. Filmed (like Flying Down to Rio)almost entirely on North American soundstages, the movie did see a Fox crew fly out to Argentina to film some exterior shots and the Division actually insisted the studio spend $40,000 re-shooting scenes that falsely depicted local customs. Yet the end result is far from ‘authentic’. There is not a proper tango in sight (or sound) in this film. The local fiesta (‘In this little village, you will find the true Argentina’, promises Ricardo) has more in common with Mexico, the espanolada˜ and other North American musicals than it does with Argentina. The night club sequences feature Miranda’s pseudo-Brazilian routines and big bands playing what sound more like Cuban rumbas, often fleshed out with North American style tap routines, swing or jazz, and sets by performers such as the Nicholas Brothers or Thomas and Catherine Dowling. The Motion Picture Division may have sought authenticity in its pursuit of a Good Neighbor agenda, but the outcome is that cultural specificity is erased and Latin America is reduced to the role of compliant exotic spectacle. While Fred and Ginger, Betty Grable and Don Ameche went on to enjoy stellar careers and remain icons of the American screen, what happened to Dolores Del Rio and Carmen Miranda? Del Rio returned to Mexico in 1943, disillusioned with the minor ‘exotic female’ roles she was being offered in Hollywood. Though she became a distinguished actor in Mexico, she slipped from world view having left California behind. Miranda’s work meantime dried up after the end of the Second World War.14 Without the pressures of the Second World War, there was no need for a Good Neigh- bor Policy in the same form, and the exotic musical showcasing Latin America faded out of favour. Latin America was returning to its real continental position, literally and metaphorically beneath North America. With a Cold War coming, and later with perceived problems of Latin American immigration, gangs and drugs, the influence of good neighbourly feelings on Hollywood would wane and ultimately disappear. Just

14 It is beyond the scope of the present article to consider in detail the careers of Del Rio and Miranda. For more see, for instance, Hershﬁeld (2000), Lopez´ (1991, 1998) and, more generally on stars and ethnicity, Shohat and Stam (2003) and Dyer (2003).

© 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Society for Latin American Studies 82 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 29, No. 1 Imagining America´ in Hollywood Movies a few decades later, the 1961 musical West Side Story would offer a very different vision of the relations between Latins and Americans. The ‘America’´ envisioned in the famous song of the same name in this movie would have no place for good neighbourly relations. The modern-day Romeo and Juliet, the white Tony and the Puerto Rican Maria, may famously sing, ‘There’s a place for us, somewhere a place for us’. However, the audience knows that that place is not yet North America.

References

Beasley-Murray, J. (2003) ‘Latin American Studies and the Global System’, in P. Swanson (ed.) The Companion to Latin American Studies. Arnold: London and New York, 222–238. Bernardi, D. (2001) Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. Carr, L. (1979) More Fabulous Faces: Dolores Del Rio, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard and Myrna Loy. Doubleday: Garden City. Dyer, R. (2003) Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. Routledge: London. Fein, S. (2003) ‘Culture Across Borders in the Americas’. History Compass 1:1–6. Friedman, L. D. (ed.) (1991) Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema. University of Illinois Press: Champaign. Frye, N. (1957) Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton University Press: Princeton. Fuentes, C. (1982) Orquıdeas´ a la luz de la luna. Seix Barral: Barcelona. Gollin, R. M. (1992) A Viewer’s Guide to Film: Arts, Artifices and Issues. McGraw-Hill: New York. Hadley-Garcıa,´ G. (1990) Hispanic Hollywood. Citadel Press: New York. Hershfield, J. (2000) The Invention of Dolores del Rio. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. Jeffers McDonald, T. (2007) Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Genre. Wallflower: London. Joseph, G. M., Legrand, C., and Salvatore, R.D. (1998) Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of US-Latin American Relations. Duke University Press: Durham. Jrade, C. L. (1998) Modernismo, Modernity and the Development of Spanish American Literature. University of Texas Press: Austin. Lopez,´ A. M. (1991) ‘Are All Latins from Manhattan? Hollywood, Ethnography and Cultural Colonialism’, in L. D. Friedman (ed.) Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema. University of Illinois Press: Champaign, 404–424. Lopez,´ A. M. (1998) ‘From Hollywood and Back: Dolores del Rio, a Trans(National) Star’. Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 17: 5–32. Purdie, S. (1993) Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse. Harvester Wheatsheaf: Hemel Hempstead. Reyes, L. and Rubie, P. (2000) Hispanics in Hollywood. Lone Eagle: Hollywood. Rock, D. (1993) ‘Argentina, 1930–1946’, in L. Bethell (ed.) Argentina Since Independence. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 173–242. Rodrıguez,´ C. E. (2004) Heroes, Lovers and Others: The Story of Latinos in Hollywood. Smithsonian Institution: Washington, DC. Rowe, K. (1995) ‘Comedy, Melodrama and Gender: Theorizing the Genres of Laughter’, in K. Brunovska Karnick and H. Jenkins (eds.) Classical Hollywood Comedy. Routledge: New York and London, 39–62. Shohat, E. and Stam, R. (2003) Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media. Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick. Swanson, P. (1995) ‘Only Joking? Gustavo Sainz and La Princesa del Palacio de Hierro: Funniness, Identity and the Post-Boom’. Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 19(1): 101–115. Swanson, P. (2003) ‘Civilization and Barbarism’, in P. Swanson (ed.) The Companion to Latin American Studies. Arnold: London and New York, 69–85. © 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 29, No. 1 83 Philip Swanson

Films

Down Argentine Way (1940) Film. Directed by Irving Cummins. USA: Twentieth Century Fox. Flying Down to Rio (1933) Film. Directed by Thornton Freeland. USA: RKO. High Society (1956) Film. Directed by Charles Walters. USA: Bing Crosby Productions. It Happened One Night (1934) Film. Directed by Frank Capra. USA: Columbia Pictures. Juarez (1939) Film. Directed by William Dieterle. USA: Warner Brothers. King Kong (1933) Film. Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. USA: RKO. Moonstruck (1987) Film. Directed by Norman Jewison. USA: MGM. The Philadelphia Story (1940) Film. Directed by George Cukor. USA: Loew’s/MGM. The Strawberry Blonde (1941) Film. Directed by Raoul Walsh. USA: Warner Brothers. Viva Villa! (1934) Film. Directed by Jack Conway and (uncredited) Howard Hawks. USA: MGM. West Side Story (1961) Film. Directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins. USA: United Artists.