Honolulu Lu (1941)
While in Hawaii, Velez begins the film as a risque nightclub act and due to her involvement with a group of sailors becomes a beauty queen.
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It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional
A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.
If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.
All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.
A surprisingly good "B" comedy from Columbia starring RKO's "Mexican Spitfire", this is a tale of mistaken identity where Latina singer Lupe Velez arrives in Hawaii and becomes two different characters, both the star of a bond drive. Consuela is the darling of Marjorie Gateson's society, and Lu is the sweetheart of the navy, having won their admiration during a nightclub show where she amusingly imitates Dietrich, Swanson, Hepburn and Hitler. Ms. Velez's impressions are dead on, and it is hysterically funny to see the Furher in a long evening gown. Leo Carrillo plays her social climbing uncle who has no idea that she is also posing as Lu, and for some reason, makes the military police think she's a spy. Lupe finds romance with the handsome Bruce Bennett who is always being stalked by his buddies (which includes a young Forrest Tucker), while Carrillo is a Latino Groucho to Gateson's stuffy Margaret Dumont type matron.Some future stars appear in smaller roles, although according to the cast list, some of them were deleted from the final print. Velez gets more opportunities to steal the scenes here, as in the "Mexican Spitfire" scenes, she was usually upstaged by Leon Errol. At just over an hour, this is just the type of second feature that audiences clamored for during the heyday of Hollywood, and being just right before America got involved in the war, it is also patriotic to the countries already involved. The scarier thought though is that with its Hawaiian setting that within months of the film's release, Pearl Harbor would be attacked.