Yolanda and the Thief

If nothing else, this 1945 musical must be the strangest thing to emerge out of the nearly twenty year-long partnership between its creators, producer Arthur Freed and director Vincente Minnelli. Appointed as head of MGM’s musical unit after helping produce The Wizard of Oz, Freed did as much as anyone to make the ‘40s and ‘50s the peak period for American film musical. Minnelli directed many of the “Freed unit’s” best films, including Meet Me in St. Louis, The Band Wagon and An American in Paris, but few of even the director’s most devoted fans would place Yolanda and the Thief among them. The movie’s basic ingredients, including the paper-thin storyline about rakish conmen and a gullible heiress and the ludicrous faux-Latin American setting, aren’t necessarily the problem; it’s just that Minnelli, Freed and co. fail to whip them up into a suitably frothy confection. Still, even if Yolanda and the Thief can’t be considered among the best musicals of its era, it still bears watching as one of the most visually audacious and experimental (if not successful) efforts of its era, and as a showcase for Technicolor at its most radiant.

Ludwig Bemelmans, the author-illustrator behind the Madeline children’s series, had a hand in the script, which might explain why it begins as a faux-naïve fable, with a Mittel-European schoolteacher lecturing his gaggle of young pupils, against the backdrop of a soundstage sunrise, on the history of “Patria,” their never-never homeland. Like little Madeline, the title character is a daughter of privilege raised by nuns. By the time Yolanda’s ready to leave behind the convent and her young classmates (including four-year old child star Gigi Perreau), however, actress Lucille Bremer looks readier for the Coconut Grove than the von Trapp family. The movie’s campy tone and gaudy visuals look forward to Minnelli’s later The Pirate (1948), in which Gene Kelly's circus acrobat impersonates the title character in order to seduce Judy Garland’s Caribbean debutante. This film takes place further south, on a latitude somewhere between the Pampas and Beverly Hills, but in the same vein of camp exotica, consigning its “dapper rogue” role to Fred Astaire as con-artist Johnny Parkson Riggs, who sets about bilk Yolanda out of her vast family fortune.

There’s something not right about how blithely Bemelmans and Thery’s script reorders the world outside the borders of Hollywood. For all of its aspirations toward weightless fantasy, the script is uncomfortably tethered to the reality of condescension toward the U.S.’s Latin American “good neighbors.” The Pirate has the same attitude, but at least applied it to an unusually multicultural fantasy world for the 1940s. Yolanda and the Thief, however, feels very much like a Yanqui-imperialist act of imagination in its conception of Yolanda’s family business, “Aquaviva,” as a United Fruit-style industrial giant. That said, there’s only so much geopolitical significance that can be imputed to a movie starring Fred Astaire as a con artist named Johnny Parkson Riggs, particularly when the con in question consists of impersonating the mark’s guardian angel, his strategy for exploiting her convent-bred piety.

The creepiness of this meet-cute scenario, more than any faint political overtones, can account for Yolanda and the Thief''s surprisingly sour tone. The 1930s screwball comedies in whose footsteps Yolanda and the Thief followed invariably contained some kind of deception or conflict, but this movie’s conceit is like It Happened One Night by way of David Mamet. Stephen Harvey’s study Directed by Vincente Minnelli points out that Astaire’s performance is “too persuasive for the script’s own good, conveying the doleful avarice of his character so thoroughly that he accentuates how unsavory the plot really is.”

Since this is musical comedy, we can at least rest secure in the knowledge that Riggs will repent of his ploy by the last reel and find true love with his heiress, and the script doesn’t make much effort to keep us in suspense over whether this will happen. Minnelli and his writers seem less interested, however, in the sickly-sweet overtones of religious redemption than in the wicked humor of their heroine discovering her decidedly non-spiritual nature attraction to her supposedly heaven-sent aide. While hardly as subversive as, say, the bourgeoisie-baiting work of Luis Bunuel (Un Chien Andalou, Viridiana), the story is darkly shaded for a 1940s musical and suggests what impelled the creation of the movie’s greatest strength, its luscious and overwrought visuals.

The inventiveness of the sets and breathtaking Technicolor cinematography come to take precedent over the music and dance sequences, more than I would expect when the dancing is by Astaire and songs by Freed (a lyricist in the 1930s and author of, among others, "Singin' in the Rain"). The biography Astaire: the Man, the Dancer, by Bill Thomas, reports that when choreographer Eugene Loring first met with Astaire, the star handed over a can of film containing his five hours’ worth of recorded performances and told him, “Look at this first, and then we’ll go to work. I don’t like to repeat myself.” What Loring came up with does not by any means embarrass Astaire, but it serves less to underline his virtuosity as a dancer than it does to support Minnelli’s decision to take the visuals into uncommonly experimental territory.

TCM.com’s page for Yolanda and the Thief contains a production history, by Frank Miller, that details how, under Minnelli’s direction, Loring and costume designer Irene Sharaff incorporated ideas from Dali paintings and Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, pushing the movie’s look into a less genteel realm of the fantastic than that usually favored by MGM. During an extended “dream ballet,” ostensibly showing the hero’s inner conflict, Fred Astaire dances against bare landscapes and mysterious blocky shapes out of a Surrealist painting. Elsewhere he’s confronted by a mysterious, seemingly six-armed man looming out of the darkness like the disembodied arms emerging from the walls of the Beast’s castle in Cocteau. In the later Coffee Time production number, perhaps the film’s high point, Astaire and Bremer twirl across a floor painted with black and white stripes, so that they seem to be ascending up and down a series of marble trenches, a Busby Berkeley image by the way of the carnival funhouse.

Whatever point these delirious visuals are supposed to be making is clearly outstripped by Minnelli and co.’s sheer delight in producing them. The dialogue and story receive comparatively little attention from the filmmakers and doesn’t make much of an impression. The one exception is a bizarre one, a bit of purportedly comic business in which Astaire and his partner-in-crime (played by Frank Morgan, The Wizard of Oz’s man behind the curtain) try to clear an elderly matron out from the hotel lobby where they’ll be working on Yolanda by dropping down on all knees and barking at her. It’s like something David Lynch could have directed more than anything I’ve ever seen in a musical comedy. I can’t imagine why it was ever written, or performed, or kept in the final cut of the movie, except as the result of an escalating series of bets.

Of the cast, Mildred Natwick, an off-and-on member of John Ford’s unofficial stock company, fares best with her enthusiastically camp performance as Yolanda’s “Aunt Amarilla,” but then it’s not difficult for her to steal scenes while playing off Lucille Bremer's brittle hauteur. This quality worked for Bremer's supporting role in Meet Me in St. Louis as Judy Garland’s older sister but here works against her supposedly pious, humble character. Leon Ames, who’d also worked for Minnelli before in Meet Me in St. Louis, and Frank Morgan are appealing in their familiar con-man roles, but with the cast largely limited to the two stars and three supporting actors the movie’s atmosphere tends to feel rather claustrophobic, overly weighed down by the emphasis on production design.

Other Minnelli musicals flirt with dark or at least not unreservedly cheerful shadings; Meet Me in St. Louis has the character of the morbid, melancholy little girl played by Margaret O’Brien, The Pirate features an uncomfortably convincing temper tantrum by Judy Garland, and even a movie as otherwise saccharine as Brigadoon has a late setpiece, of one of the characters trying to escape from the titular village, that’s like The Most Dangerous Game by way of Lerner and Loewe. Yolanda and the Thief, however, doesn’t seem to know whether to treat its darker themes as campy humor or defuse it through the affected, fable-like innocence. The story’s religious aspects don’t appear, to put it lightly, to have struck a very deep chord with Minnelli. He invests greater feeling in The Pirate, an equally silly movie but one closer to his experience of the dreams that cause people to become involved with show business and the “traveling players” spirit that enables them to continue. As a storybook fable, Yolanda and the Thief should have stayed on the page; as a film, everything that works about it comes from what Minnelli managed to put up on the screen.