(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
— David Hudson, IFC.com
The
U.S. had been at war almost a year by the time You Were Never Lovelier
was made, but the suits decided, perhaps wisely, to keep Fred out of
it. Naturally, they didn't want to admit that Fred was over draft age,
so they sent him down to Argentina, where he could lead a life of leisure
without a guilty conscience. Fred's a dancer (of course), but he's tired
of dancing, so he trades Manhattan for Buenos Aires.
Hey,
there's no plot like an old plot. You Were Never Lovelier could
have been fun. But the script, and the acting, let us down hard. The
screenwriters simply never come up with anything clever or funny, and
the Acuna sisters are left to giggle their way through the rest of the
picture.
Xavier
Cugat is surely not much of a name these days, but he was an enduring
presence in American popular music for decades, and several dozen CDs
offering his inimitable brand of Latin kitsch are available via the
Internet. Cugat led the house band for the fabled Coconut Grove in Hollywood
back in the twenties and, according to the Hyp Records "Vinyl
Safari" site,6 provided background music for the first two
talking pictures, Don Juan and The Jazz Singer.
1. The U.S. State Department might have had a hand in this as well. A few Latin American governments, and Argentina in particular, had the not very good idea that Nazi Germany might serve as a "Big Brother" to counterbalance the Colossus of the North. Hollywood poured out a stream of Good Neighbor films in the forties, most notably The Three Caballeros (1944), in which Donald Duck and his two Latin amigos dive-bomb South American cuties on a beach. (The New Yorker, too big for its britches even then, described the film as "a mixture of atrocious taste, bogus mysticism, and authentic fantasy, guaranteed to baffle any critic not hopelessly enchanted with the word ‘Disney'.")
2. Bitten by the Latin bug, Fred dances with his ass for one of the few times in his career, and also jumps up on Menjou's desk and beats him over the head with his cane. (Serves him right, the fascist!)
3. The pleasure of the number is slightly diminished by the fact that Rita lip-synchs the words. (Nan Wynn does the real singing.)
4. One can imagine the effect this number had on all-male audiences in military theaters. Once can also imagine the numerous shouted suggestions for Fred to step aside and let a "real man" take over.
5. According to an online trivia note, the film originally contained a dance for "You Were Never Lovelier" but it was cut from the film.
6. The dudes at Hyp know absolutely everything about off-the-wall vinyl, but are too pure even to mention CDs, so if you actually want to listen to Cugie, Martin Denny, Yma Sumac, Esquivel, etc., you'll have to do your own shopping.
7. After he and Abbe split in the sixties, Cugat married infamous sex bombette Charo, passing her off as a folk singer. Hey, what the public wants, the public gets.
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