Yolanda and the Thief (1945)

(On Cable TV, February 2021) The farther down I get in Fred Astaire’s filmography, the more I understand why they’re not his more popular films. On paper, there should be plenty to like about Yolanda and the Thief:  It’s a 1940s colour musical featuring Astaire as a con artist making his way to a fictional Latin American country and hatching a scheme to seduce an heiress. Alas, the limits of the film become more apparent once you realize that he intends to do so by posing as her guardian angel. Such shaky narrative hooks may have worked with a more interesting execution, but they just compound the problem that Yolanda and the Thief is one of the least interesting Astaire films I’ve seen so far. Despite the gorgeous (and self-conscious) colour cinematography and expansive direction from Vincente Minelli, the film itself doesn’t seem to have the light touch and humour of other Astaire films — it’s weighed down by its own ambitious dance numbers, ironically leaving less for Astaire himself to do. Considering that Astaire is his single best asset, it almost leaves him stranded in the middle of his own film. He’s usually not bad playing a cad, but an outright thief preying upon the devout may be a step too far. It doesn’t help that Lucille Bremer is bland in the lead role—I usually like redheads a lot, but she doesn’t do much here as she should—perhaps illustrating the lack of that elusive “star quality” we all talk about. (Bremer retired from Hollywood shortly thereafter.)  Yolanda and the Thief is at its most remarkable when it delves into surreal fantasy sequences, most notably a long ballet sequence that anticipates similar film-stopping flights of fancy as The Red Shoes or An American in Paris a few years later. It’s something to see all right, but is it an Astaire kind of film? The substantially lower number of dance sequences doesn’t help, nor does the substantially less humorous narrative. But, well, it’s still another Astaire film — and one of the weirdest on record. It’s worth seeing, but don’t be in a hurry.