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In the year of Spellbound, a forthright acquisition of Dalí for the Technicolor storybook. Ruritania in the Andes, "not a country but a cemetery with a train running through it," they call it Patria. Out of the convent and into the business world, the naïve heiress (Lucille Bremer) turns to the angelic statue in the garden. Her prayers are overheard by the traveling swindler (Fred Astaire), who arranges for a meeting in a hotel lobby and, after weaving his own mise en scène of throne, mural and slanted lighting, offers himself as the heavenly guardian. A dream ballet reveals the conman's conflicted mind, dilemmas stripped down to pure form and anxiety (downpours of gold coins, entrapping cloth streamers, reserve motion and turbine gales, disembodied wedding bells), he awakens to behold his partner about to douse him with a pitcher of water. "When you have a nightmare, you sure keep busy!" Frank Morgan is there to point up the Wizard of Oz connection, first and foremost however this is a conscious dilation of Vincente Minnelli's style, every MGM cog and wheel at his fingertips. (The yellow brick road here is a dance floor of Copacabana swirls, the camera sweeps over the pirouetting figures.) Processions and chorales, plumed llamas and warbling servants—a colorist's rococo approach down to the greenish foam in the royal bathtub. Childish and acerbic like the sacrilegious thought that crosses the maiden's mind, a blur of purity and desire answered after the Carnaval by Borges paraphrased: "Every night is not a fiesta." A musical watershed, and a template for the oneiric Minnelli heroine (The Pirate, Madame Bovary, Gigi, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever). With Mildred Natwick, Leon Ames, Mary Nash, Ludwig Stössel, Leon Belasco, and Gigi Perreau.
--- Fernando F. Croce |