Fiesta (1947)

Simply A Masterpiece

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

hyped garbage

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Esther Williams was not my aunt although I had an aunt named Esther. As other reviewers have noted, Ms. Williams was miscast. I have known naturally blond Mexican women, redheaded Mexican women, etc. but they didn't look European (ancestry), like Esther. She resembles Ingrid Bergman. Had the film been set in Spain, it would have been more believable because a lot of Spaniards are fair-skinned and look a lot like Europeans and Americans.So, what does this have to do with the overall production? Besides the mis-casting, the script is awful, the film boring and, just because an actor has a birthday, doesn't mean TCM should devote an entire day or week to his/her films. I am not young, so I remember Esther Williams, but to some she was a movie heroine. I think of Esther as being a step below Doris Day, not giving much credit to either.

As an add to a review above which wondered whether Ricardo Montalban had any actual experience as a pianist or was just faking it, I think I can definitively answer, as a pianist myself, yes, he's a pianist (having just seen Fiesta, and the barroom scene where his character Mario Morales takes to the house upright to accompany himself, his composition having just come up on the radio).That's not him on the soundtrack, probably, but he's most definitely fingering the quite complex piece correctly (con mucho gusto!), and this means that yes, Senor Montalban has a talent many of us were previously unaware of.Discovered to my surprise the same thing about Gary Oldman, as I watched him as Ludwig Van Beethoven in Immortal Beloved, and Kyle McLachlan as Ray Manzarek in The Doors.

This film introduced Ricardo Montalban to the screen. He is with his twin sister, played by Esther Williams. You can see from childhood that Ricardo loves music more than the bull ring. His father is passionate about the latter and literally demands that Mario, Montalban, follow his career into the ring as well.Of course, we have the inevitable showdown between father and son. To lure Montalban back, sister Maria goes into the ring herself to fight the bulls.The music, while lively, is the typical Mexican dance routines. Mary Astor plays the mother of Mario and Maria, and she has one dramatic scene where she tells of her fear of the ring both for her husband and son.The ending is a bit silly, but these kind of pictures generally have that air about themselves anyway. Note a young Cyd Charisse, as Mario's girlfriend. She does little dancing, but Esther Williams is not in the water either.

I've viewed this film over and over and my piano training says there's no trick photography in the scenes where Montalban plays Green's adaptation of El Salon Mexico. I'm sure the beat-up old piano is not the actual sound source, but Montalban is hitting all the right keys at the right time! His technique is well above average, and anyone who could even fake that well would have to be able to play well too. Yet there's no mention of musical skill or training in any of his bios, nor does he play in any later films. Can anyone shed some light on this mysterious aspect of the multi-talented Senor Montalban?