Rio Rita (1929)

Beautiful, moving film.

The acting in this movie is really good.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The team of Wheeler and Woolsey got their start in film as the comic second leads, and as a result, they are often more remembered for this film than the leads, Bebe Daniels and John Boles. Like Mr. Boles' other big musical of 1929, "The Desert Song", this focuses on the romance between a hero masquerading as a criminal and a respectable lady. Best remembered as the temperamental Dorothy Brock in "52nd Street", Daniels possessed a fine soprano voice and makes a nice pair with the handsome but dull Boles.Some lavish production numbers help make this one of the best early sound musicals (as opposed to a silent musical). Wheeler and Woolsey are joined by the perky Dorothy Lee who provides a cute secondary romance for squeaky voiced Wheeler. As for Woolsey, he's given the best lines, but the style would improve in later films. Forgotten for decades, Wheeler and Woolsey have fortunately been re- discovered. While they were long deceased by the time of that, Miss Lee was still around, and commented on both men and how much fun they had making these films. Some Busby Berkley overhead style shots are utilized, making this primitive movie musical a lot better than many of them being released at the time. The two W's had utilized the slap scene before, but got more fans by moving to the screen. People's shout of "Whoah!" is heard here, although quite a bit differently than it would be later on. So while not one of the best W&W films, it was a great way for them to start.

For a 1929 musical, "Rio Rita" is pretty good. However, early talkie musicals stink--so this isn't a glowing endorsement. Like too many of these films, this one is extremely stagy, the singing is god-awful by today's standards and the film is dated beyond the capacity of most viewers to stick with the movie. So I am saying the film is terrible, right? Well, no. It is well worth seeing if you are very familiar with films of the era or if you are a huge fan of early comedies, as it's the first film featuring Wheeler and Woolsey, a duo who achieved a lot of success in the 1930s but who are practically forgotten today.The film is about some Mexican outlaw named 'The Kinkajou'--an odd name since a kinkajou is a very unassuming looking little creature that kind of cute. The bandit, a federal agent and the Kinkajou's sister all come together in Mexico. However, apart from this main plot are Wheeler & Woolsey who are almost like an entirely different movie within the movie. Wheeler is a guy in love with his usual on- screen love, Dorothy Lee, though this is complicated since he is technically STILL married. Woolsey is his lawyer. When it turns out the wife (who Wheeler THINKS he's legally divorced) has come into a fortune, Woolsey makes a play for her!The characters sing and sing and sing in this film. There is definitely too much singing and it's made worse since so much of it is dated and dull--and almost operatic in style. Combined with the original Ziegfeld song and dance numbers, it's all very hard to take. Plus, the songs are so omnipresent that they really get in the way of the plot--and often derail the comedy. The film also would have greatly benefited from getting rid of the whole Kinkajou plot!Overall, this is an odd little curio that is of interest to nuts like me who want to see Wheeler & Woolsey in their first film. Otherwise, you need to have a lot of patience to bother with this dated old musical.FYI--Some of the film is in color--very nice looking for 1929. It's obvious that RKO was really pulling out the stops in their first film. However, I assume the color prints for some of the reels were lost, so the film goes back and forth between the two.

What a lot of movie buffs may not be aware of is the surprise and delight that the movie audiences of 1929 felt when they first heard Bebe Daniels's singing voice on the silver screen. By the time sound pictures began to appear, Daniels had already been a major silent film star for years, most notably headlining in romantic comedies for Paramount. She was quite popular with audiences, and she was considered a real beauty, too. Yet before the advent of sound, screen audiences (for the most part) didn't know what her voice sounded like... They could only imagine. So at a time when the arrival of sound sometimes killed the careers of heretofore popular movie stars, many so-called "hot" personalities found their personas diminished on the talking screen. Not so with Daniels. No matter what people might have been expecting before the lights went down and the sound came on, as it turned out, in "Rio Rita", her singing voice was nothing short of a sensation. Teaming her with the incredibly handsome John Boles was a nice bit of casting, too, because he too was blessed with a wonderful singing voice. Their "duet in counterpoint" at the beginning of the film (he sings the title tune while she sings "River of My Dreams") must have been a revelation, and one can almost imagine the theatre audiences swooning when it was first heard in 1929. So no matter what others may tell you about this "Rita", the thing to keep in mind is that with almost all of these early talkies, the viewers today who will appreciate them the most are those who can project themselves back in time when they watch them.

This was a huge hit in 1929 and was one of RKO's first film releases. It was based on the successful Ziegfeld 1927 stage show that featured Wheeler & Woolsey, pairing them together for the first time. It also features two-strip Technicolor for the last thirty minutes. There you have it, film history-wise. As for the content of the film? Don't bother, it's terrible. In fact, almost unwatchable. Aside from secondary player Dorothy Lee, an 18 year-old (at the time) ball of personality, the rest of the cast is dull or obnoxious. Dull: leads Bebe Daniels and John Boles. Obnoxious: Wheeler & Woolsey. The story is antique: Rio Grande Mexican gal Rita and her impossible love for Ranger Boles. The music score is almost entirely forgettable and the staginess of the whole thing from dance numbers to solo vocals is quite obvious. Lastly, the comedy team of Wheeler & Woolsey are abominably bad, making one understand quickly how they've become forgotten. Their antics are painful to watch, especially since they're having such a good time being so unfunny. Obviously they're replicating their stage performance at a time when their material might have been considered enjoyable, thus they react as if what they're doing is just killing the audience. 75-plus years later and we're in a different comedy world, admittedly, but I see little in W & W's work in this film to invoke anything more than head scratching or annoyance. And most of their following films are no better. As I said, this film is only of interest for historians, unless you are very easily entertained.