THE CINEMA
THE Copacabana, in case you are interested, is a genuine night club in Manhattan, and is listed in the New Yorker's comprehensive list of entertainments under the heading "Big and Brassy." In the film it is certainly big, but not particularly brassy, and its patrons are about the most depressed set of people you could imagine. This may be partly explained by the fact that the fare provided includes a singer named Andy Russell who delivers himself of an aria whose lyric, believe it or not, begins "My heart was doing the bolero Under the stars in Rio de Janeiro."
The leading players in Copacabana are Carmen Miranda and Groucho Marx, and the uses to which they are put by the. director may be regarded as classic examples of the inability of some Holly- wood producers to know what to do with a good`thing.
Carmen Miranda, while not everybody's cup of tea, is extremely good at frenetic dances from South America ; and she has the great merit of not aiming at beauty as well as vivacity. But, not content with one Miranda, the director, following an all too familiar trend, insists on multiplying her by two. A drearily complicated plot causes her to take two jobs at the same night-club, as herself in the cabaret and as Mademoiselle Fifi, with blonde wig and Moroccan veil, in the cocktail bar upstairs. She goes on doing this for a very long time, and she is not the only one to find it rather tiring.
Meantime there is Groucho without Chico and Harpo ; worse still with a neat little waxed moustache. From time to time his enormous gift for wisecracks comes triumphantly to the fore, but even so the breathless speed of delivery has been cancelled out ; every joke is laboriously built up to, and is followed by a ghastly pause for laughter. For one moment it looks as though the genuine Marx will reappear in the form (once again) of a poppelgiinger with the old furry smudge under the nose and the king loping stride we all like so much. But all that emerges is a mediocre cabaret act, like nearly everything else in the film, and poor Groucho remains a rather sad wanderer in search of his vanished brothers.
Copacabana is one of those few films which really ought to be in the most sizzling Technicolor; instead it is photographed, no more than competently, in the drabbest monochrome. For all I know the whole thing may be a big box-office success; the cinema is a
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