Yolanda and the Thief

If Yolanda and the Thief isn't the damnedest thing ever committed to film, it's hard to say what is. Vincente Minnelli took a wisp of whimsey from Ludwig Bemelmans and turned it into this overblown fantasy musical that pushes the flap of the envelope wide open.

Most musicals – the best of them, anyway – grow out of show business lore and derive their pluck and sass from the raffish traditions of show-must-go-on troupers. But Yolanda and the Thief invents a Latin-American Ruritania (called Patria, or fatherland) out of stereotypes which verge on the offensive but stay simperingly coy. It's a kind of squeaky-clean utopia of the clueless Lost Horizon sort run by a benevolent family of oligarchs called the Aquavivas.

Their only daughter (Lucille Bremer), having reached her majority, leaves the convent school where she is allowed to wear full Hollywood makeup. The vast family fortune becomes hers to administer with the help of a dotty aunt (Mildred Natwick, and the best thing in the movie). Alas, the good sisters have not equipped her to cope with the wicked ways of the world, as personified by a couple of American con-artists (Fred Astaire and Frank Morgan) who arrange an introduction and plan to abscond with a sizeable chunk of her assets. Astaire poses as an angel for the impressionable girl, and almost gets away with it, except he – inevitably – falls for her. Plus, on the fringes of the action, a real angel operates....

Harmless enough piffle, but get a load of the musical numbers. Full-tilt phantasmagorias that look like Busby Berkeley on acid or crystal or absinthe, they get bigger and more grandiose and ever loonier, with colors so brash that sunglasses are in order (was this the first head movie?). The set and costume designers must have had field day, what with Minnelli extending them a carte blanche they certainly never had before and would never have again until the debut of the music video. But the songs stay resolutely uninspired, which takes the starch out of the dancing (even much of Astaire's). It's safe to say nobody strode out of the theaters in 1945 whistling snappy tunes from Yolanda and the Thief.

It's not exactly fun to watch but you can't take your eyes off it, either. A one-of-a-kind Technicolor extravaganza, it makes you wonder how – not to say why – it ever got made. Astaire's reputation must have taken a nosedive after its release, and as for Bremer? She makes you long for Ginger Rogers – even the very late Ginger Rogers.

Vincent Minnelli loves pure beauty, and in "Yolanda and the Thief" he's in heaven.

Here he has the unbridled luxury of reveling in rich colors, stylish costumes, imaginative dream sequences, and a carnival dance scene that's breathtaking.

With Arthur Freed and Harry Warren's tuneful songs, music supervision by Roger Edens and direction by Lennie Hayton, the score simply glows.

Right from the start, "This is a Day for Love" spans a colorful countryside, moving into a processional and to a lovely convent setting. At midpoint, there's a fantasy through cobblestone streets, to a "magical" pond (from which a remarkable "apparition" emerges) to a multileveled plane with assorted choreographic groupings.

This complex fantasy undoubtedly inspired Gene Kelly six years later in developing his great ballet sequence of "An American in Paris." The expansive MGM sound stages are fully utilized in both executions to their fullest.

Then the show-stopping "Coffee Time" choreography by Eugen Loring, and deftly danced by Fred Astaire, Lucille Bremer and company, is a masterpiece of concept and execution.

Starting off with a lone female trio stepping and clapping off-beat in 5/4, a startling 4/4 song is suddenly superimposed upon the "ground"--with dance and clap movements clearly continuing in 5/4. To add to the "tour de force, a slower pas de deux emerges in the irregular meter, only to be followed by the corps' return to the regular, with everything "taken out" in combined meters.

It's really something to see this dance, which is obviously the result of many weeks of painstaking work from a number of departments, so smoothly executed. Astaire is on top of his form, with Bremer right there every step of the way. They make as beautiful a pair here as in the lovely "This Heart of Mine" number from "Ziegfield Follies."

As for Minnelli, he must have been ecstatic throughout this picturesque production. Mildred Natwick shines in her hilarious role as Aunt, and Frank Morgan and Leon Ames provide able support.

The script itself is a serviceable backdrop for the art departments' joining the music team in having a field day crafting a very beautiful production.

As for Minnelli, this was certainly among his happiest hours in filmmaking.

It's impossible to hate any film with Fred Astaire, Frank Morgan and Mildred Natwick giving their considerable all, but it's awfully hard to like any film with such forgettable songs (out of Harry Warren's bottom drawer), forgettable dances inspired by them from choreographer Eugene Loring (except for the promising percussive *introduction* to an ultimately dreary number called "Coffee Time") and a script that never pays off on a single one of its satiric possibilities.

At it's best, the old "studio system" of production by second guessing and committee could produce masterpieces. At its muddled worst, it produced things like YOLANDA AND THE THIEF and blamed them on the cast. Coming at about the middle of Fred Astaire's long film career, and early in Lucille Bremer's four year one, it couldn't ultimately hurt Astaire who would be back on top in three years with EASTER PARADE (interesting that his brief "retirement" in response to this turkey is not remembered in the same way Bette Davis's similarly motivated walkout from another studio is for his being "difficult"), but it did nothing to promote Bremer's career despite what looked like acceptable dancing and at least minimal acting skills and a certain homogenized beauty.

Chief blame would appear to lie with Irving Brecher's script from Ludwig Bemelmans & Jacques Thery's nasty little fairy tale of a story. Trading on the worst stereotypes of the evils of a Convent education (not that a too sheltered education isn't a bad thing), Bremer's "Yolanda" is too naive to be believed and a victim looking for a crime. Only those ALMOST as naive in the audience will not recognize Leon Ames's "Mr. Candle" character immediately for what he turns out to be, and the simple (even expected) plot twists which could make his character and Mildred Natwick's "Aunt Amarilla" interesting are never forthcoming.

Only Natwick's self centered monologue when Bremer returns to her home from the convent rises above the rest of the script and is very funny - creating hopes for what follows that never pay off. The final scene of the film is so perfunctory you get the impression the studio told Minnelli to wrap up filming regardless of what was left to do - but fans of the British sci-fi sitcom "Red Dwarf" may be amused to note that the central gimmick of the scene (and the film's only moment of misdirection or real irony) was stolen years later as the basis for a Red Dwarf episode in its first season.

Among things which ARE of interest in the film: the man who went on to become the great Broadway dancer and choreographer, Matt Mattox, is buried somewhere in the innocuous mess as an unbilled "featured dancer." One wonders if the (uncredited) "Dilettante" played by an actor calling himself "Andre Charlot" is any relation to the great British producer who introduced Gertrude Lawrence and Beatrice Lillie to U.S. shores for the first time in the 1920's?

It was shown on TCM this past weekend. It's a fantasy musical which has sort of unanimously been regarded as a mild stinker-- but amazingly has been amalgamated with a cult following over the years. (What're you gonna do?) It's not a serious piece of movie- not even in the Hollywood-attempting-a-certain-atmosphere vain. One look at the artificial sets, the candy-box Technicolor, and the performances and you need- I repeat NEED- to suspend yourself for 106 minutes and just let go. Lucille Bremer was actually a fine dancer (if you watched her and Fred Astaire in ZIEGFELD FOLLIES), but her abilities are not put to best use here. Record it (as I did), and just fast-forward to "Coffee Time," a sensational, four-minute hand-clapping dance performed in a Latin Carnival, on a floor of swirling black-and-white zebra stripes, easily the best thing in the movie.

This one is a strange one. Set in a fictional South American Country, Fred Astaire plays a con man who impersonates a guardian angel to Lucille Bremer's innocent, convent raised character. While he is trying to get to her vast fortune, he of course falls in love with her.

The story is over-shadowed by the bizarre musical numbers. There is a dream sequence which is one of the longest, most mesmerizing musical numbers ever put on film (eat your heart out Salvadore Dali). The number `Coffee Time' looks like it was fun to film and the dance floor will cause you to,have optical illusions.

The sets are very opulent and the Technicolor is breathtaking. Over-all I rate this film highly because it is so off-beat. I read that this film cost 6 million dollars to make, and was a huge box office failure, and that Fred Astaire nearly retired because of his experience with it.