Fiesta (1947)
(On Cable TV, February 2022) I haven’t seriously started digging into that filmography, but Classic Hollywood often looked south of the nearest border for inspiration, and there’s a not-inconsiderable corpus of films embracing Mexican culture even in the 1930s–1950s. Not many of them are particularly good or well-remembered, though. Fiesta feels like a lot of them: More exotic than the usual Hollywood films of the time, but still curiously dull despite an impressive cast and some melodramatic flourishes. Hailed as Richard Montalban’s Hollywood debut (and indeed, you can use much of Montalban’s early filmography as a first cut at the whole Hollywood-does-Mexico subgenre), it also features Esther Williams and (in a very minor role) Cyd Charisse cast as Mexican women. (While admittedly weird for Williams, the dark-haired Charisse had a substantial number of roles in which she was cast as being of non-white ethnicity.) The story itself is a toreador melodrama in which Williams passes herself off as her brother in order to fight bulls in the arena, while said brother finds artistic achievement as a music composer. It sounds wilder summarized like that than it does in the film, where the slower pacing and colourful asides almost help viewers overlook the insanity of the plotting. Fiesta itself is okay—not particularly engaging despite the atmosphere, but with just enough interest to prevent viewers from drifting away. A young pre-stardom Charisse is striking in her few short scenes, while young Montalban is a delight and Williams gets away from the water-based roles that characterized much of her filmography. But Fiesta doesn’t measure up to its own wild production history as summarized on Wikipedia, with on-location shooting leading to the death of two crewmembers by cholera, bullfighting sequences leading to four stuntmen being injured badly enough to require hospitalization, fighting between the crew and the locals, as well as considerable controversy about the local toreador hired (or rather: not-hired) for the film and the bulls being killed (or rather initially not-killed) at the end of it. Never mind remaking Fiesta—I’d want a movie about the making of Fiesta.