Rio [DVD]

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The Brazilian city Rio de Janeiro is serving as the setting for two films being released this April: one being a full on action film, Fast and Furious 5, the other being a family animated adventure. My personal favourites were the double act Kipo (Robin Thicke) and Marcel (Carlos Ponce) who were the dumb henchmen for the poacher and outsmarted by a cockatoo. Interestingly, James Stewart was apparently briefly slated for this film, presumably in Cummings’s part, and nearly lost his Destry Rides Again role in the process, with Joel McCrea briefly replacing him on that film. She made a big splash in Algiers and The Adventures of Marco Polo (both 1938, that latter also starring Rathbone), but made few films after, the best known being the interesting Three Faces West (1940) with John Wayne.

Born in Brooklyn but raised in Norway and other parts of Europe, she was dubbed “the Norwegian Garbo,” though her singing in Rio is rather more like sub-Marlene Dietrich.

When Blu, a domesticated macaw from small-town Minnesota, meets the fiercely independent Jewel, he takes off on an adventure to Rio de Janeiro with the bird of his dreams. Compared to Hathaway she is a feisty, strong female character who wants to explore and distrusts humans. Blu the Spix's Macaw's (Jesse Eisenberg) early life is tragic, having fledging from his nest too early and been kidnapped by poachers.

Maybe original film elements weren’t available in this case, but I can offer no definitive explanation. Irene, meanwhile, has resumed her singing career, at Roberto’s Café, where Dirk works as a bartender. The animation of the parrots climbing is particularly well done and true to live to anyone who has ever own one. Instead of exploring any of these ideas, the last third of the picture becomes depressingly conventional, with Reynaud indeed escaping with another prisoner (Irving Bacon), though just how he breaks out isn’t even shown.

Rathbone may have been attracted to its very un-Rathboney aspects—at one point for instance, he’s filthy and bare-chested, hacking his way through swampy jungles with a machete—but the script lets him down. It has a few interesting qualities, and Rathbone is good if theatrical in an unusual role, but the film is very minor and the video transfer unexpectedly below Universal’s average for black-and-white films of this vintage (for various Blu-ray labels). Its Production Code-mandated resolution so preordained, the script is forced into directions that neatly tie everything up but in the least interesting and satisfying way imaginable. Sentenced to a long prison term on Devil’s Island, he asks Dirk (Victor McLaglen), his inexplicably devoted valet and bodyguard, to look after Reynaud’s wife, Irene (Sigrid Gurie), hoping she’ll soon forget him.

Rock in Rio is a recurring music festival held at the City of Rock (Cidade do Rock) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.On one hand, it’s great to see movies as obscure as Rio getting the Blu-ray treatment, and with an audio commentary yet, but the film is minor and ultimately a disappointment. Rathbone plays Paul Reynaud, a Bernie Madoff-type Parisian financier arrested for embezzlement and forgery, causing a huge scandal in France’s banking industry and rampant personal bankruptcies among Paris’s millionaires, some of whom commit suicide. After three successful festivals (1985, 1991, and 2001), they branched to other locations: Lisboa (Portugal), Madrid (Spain), and Las Vegas (USA). There she encounters alcoholic American engineer Bill Gregory (Robert Cummings), on an extended bender after a bridge he designed collapsed.