Luther Reed | Rio Rita / 1929

birds of a feather

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luther Reed (screenplay, based on the musical by Guy Bolton and Frederick A. Thompson, with music by Harry Tierney and lyrics by Joseph McCarthy), Luther Reed (director) Rio Rita / 1929

 

The 1927 Ziegfeld-produced musical Rio Rita, with a script by Guy Bolton and Frederick A. Thompson, music by Harry Tierney, and lyrics by Joseph McCarthy, was fairly successful, with a run of 494 performances—a long run in its day. Although Bolton continued to write with his partners Thompson and P. G. Wodehouse, working with Jerome Kern, Ira and George Gershwin, and Cole Porter among others, it was clear to many in that very year, after the premiere of Oscar Hammerstein II and Kern’s Show Boat, that musical theater was about to change. Yet Bolton went on writing his frothy, nonsense musicals featuring exotic locales, college coeds, and young voyagers for the rest of his life, helping to move the US and British musical theater world away from the operettas of the day, but offering little of profundity or coherence in his narratives.

      Rio Rita was transformed into a film musical, directed by Luther Reed, in the important year of 1929, an early sound musical with half of it in Technicolor. It was RKO’s biggest success until King Kong in 1933, and was named by Film Daily as one of the 10 best films of the year.

      Watching the film yesterday, 40 minutes of it now permanently lost (The Museum of Modern Art in New York once had a copy of the entire movie, it was evidently stolen or lost as well) I suddenly realized why after just two or three years, film musicals suddenly lost their credibility and clout. If filmmakers of the day might have been curious as to why their audiences suddenly lost interest in the cinematic wonder of a musical talkie, in the courtroom trial of history I would put forward this film as exhibit number A. Watching Rio Rita was a painful experience—and this comes from someone engaged for more than 65 years in Broadway musical theater history who deeply loves the genre.

      The exotic locale in this case is the border between Texas and Mexico along the Rio Grande, allowing the work to engage a whole chorus of Texas Rangers; a beautiful Mexican landowner, Rita Ferguson (Bebe Daniels); her mysterious brother, Roberto (Don Alvarado) who stumbles along in a serape, part of his disguise to hide the fact that he is working for the Mexican police; another stranger stumbling along in a serape, pretending to be a regular Mexican who is actually Capt. Jim Stewart (John Boles) of the Rangers; the surly local self-declared General, inexplicably a Russian named Ravinoff (performed by French actor Georges Renavent); a dizzy American male, Chick Bean—who has gone to Mexico for a divorce and marries another girl, Dolly (Dorothy Lee) before he discovers that the US doesn’t accept Mexican divorces—and his shyster lawyer Ned Lovett (of the comedy team of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey); dozens of peasant chorus girls and boys; and a mysterious bandit Kinkajou, who everyone seems to be seeking but at different times is thought to be Roberto, Jim, and even Chick, but who is really Ravinoff, the villain of the piece. I won’t go much further with the plot since when you have a bill of characters such as these there can be no further logic.

     Other than the threads of the search for Kinkajou and Chick’s search for a divorce, the events of this work consist mostly of various songs and dances in different styles depending upon whether they occur on pueblo streets, in Ravinoff’s mansion, or on a gambling barge tethered to the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. In the missing frames there was evidently some forest scenes where the Rangers chased after Kinkajou, but in the musical that part of the plot is basically dropped until the very end. The songs, except perhaps for the title song, “Rio Rita,” sung at least three times—but then every song in this work is reprised—are unmemorable ditties. Although I love the lyrics of "The Rangers' Song":

 

                           We’re all pals together

                           Birds of a feather…

                           Good pals rain or shine.

                           We’re rangers man to man. (abbreviated lyrics)

 

      Indeed the two threads become so untethered, like the barge line at the end, that one might almost say there are two movies, one with Rita, her brother, the Rangers, and Ravinoff, and the other with Chick and Ned and two girls to whom Chick is married, his former wife necessarily showing up at the last moment to provide Ned with a romantic interest, particularly since she has just inherited 3 million dollars. Chick doesn’t seem to care since he’s got his Dolly. In fact, the boys don’t seem to really care about their women, Chick at one point singing about his difficulties in hanging on to them.

     In later films of the early 1930s such as Diplomaniacs and Hips Hips Hooray they developed entire vaudeville sketches involving queer jokes, but here they only encounter a wine steward who when he believes Chick to be the renowned Kinkajou, keeps kissing him on the cheeks and finally on the lips, whom they join in a late-film scene, where after having met up with their respective female mates, to reprise the song "Sweetheart We Need Each Other" while basically squeezing and slapping elements of each other’s necks and faces before they kiss one another on the lips and fall off the boat together, leaving their two companions on either side of them to fall in backwards after. Presumably the surprise of cold water helped them to get everything right again.

    Clearly these skits are queer, perhaps even meant to suggest the sort of permanent relationship these two vaudevillians have with one another, but to describe them to be of significant LGBTQ interest is to stretch it a bit. Perhaps queer film commentator Richard Barrios sums it up best: “The musical theatre of the time was full of such comic traditions, giving wide latitude to jokes and behavior that today might seem too gay for many contexts. In some cases, it was just a matter of being fey and whimsical in ways that burlesque and television comics rendered obsolete.” And soon after such films themselves became dinosaurs.

 

Los Angeles, August 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).