YOLANDA AND THE THIEF (MGM, 1945) Warner Archive

Begun with lofty aspirations, Vincente Minnelli's Yolanda and the Thief (1945) is, at once, a breathtaking escapist romp through some reconstituted Hispano-American Technicolor utopia, and an unreservedly bizarre fantasia of the garish and absurd that, at least in part, is too grounded by its many misfires along the way to satisfactorily fulfill our musical daydreams. Even as an artifact of pure Minnellian artistry, Yolanda and the Thief fails to bewitch - and this, despite some of Minnelli's most inventive staging. The screenplay by Irving Brecher is saddled by frightfully maudlin source material from Jacques Thery and Ludwig Bemelmans fobbed off as a short story first published in Town and Country magazine. The tale is of an heiress, Yolanda Acquaviva (Lucille Bremer) who, having spent her formative years cloistered inside a convent, is foisted onto the unsuspecting world without first being able to fully comprehend its awful, wicked ways. If the picture is remembered at all today, it is for Minnelli’s sub-tropic luxe, intermittently marred by a queer infusion of Catholic guilt as the sexually repressed Yolanda steadily develops amorous feelings for ‘her angel’ (who turns out to be a con man played by Fred Astaire). Certainly, no previous MGM musical had ever dared to be so invested in such a hallucinogenic experiment gone awry to the tune of $2,443,704. Yet, Yolanda and the Thief is a distraction at best; one of two, then simultaneously in production and afflicting Minnelli and Freed in tandem. Their other, Ziegfeld Follies (1945) would not fare much better.

The inherent flimsiness in Bemelman and Thery’s rough outline for the picture remained intact in the final shooting script, a whimsical slant more intelligently procured on Bemelman’s popular, ‘Madeline’ books for children, but strangely to coagulate into ersatz-naïveté when squarely pitched at adults. In hindsight, it’s the prosaic saccharine of the plot and these comatose wax mannequins who populate it that does the story in. Yolanda’s imbecilic devotion to the ‘angel’, and his cruel exploitation of her virtue, until – rather predictably – divine intervention gingerly tempts his avarice to extol a more latent altruism from the ashes of his con, sounds the death knell for this modern-age fable. Indeed, there is something ‘Old Testament’ godless and perverse about a mortal female, on the cusp of burgeoning womanhood, having erotic feelings for her spiritual guide. Worse, the picture is set in a Pan-American principality, weirdly anchored in the traditions of a stage bound Middle-European operetta, herein populated by dull-eyed, mindless Latino peons, with a most patronizing desire is to be completely governed by one presumably benevolent and wealthy landowner whose only daughter, the eponymous Yolanda, now stands to inherit everything. Rather self-consciously, Minnelli strives to paint the proverbial ‘lipstick’ on this pig of a plot, using his creative Crayolas on one of the most lavishly odd and artistically insane production numbers ever conceived for the screen – ‘Coffee Time’ – in which Astaire, uncharacteristically denied virtually every opportunity to exercise his dancer’s acumen elsewhere herein (and in a musical in which he is the star, no less) is afforded a moment to cut loose with Bremer at carnival.

As scripted, Yolanda Aquaviva leaves her cloistered school to assume control of her family's financial empire. It seems Yolanda's native country, Patria is a principality governed by one family - hers. It is a warm and sunny - yet oddly sterile oligarchy, managed in Yolanda's absence by her obtuse Aunt Amarilla (Mildred Natwick) - who cannot even remember where the west wing of the house is, much less yield the necessary force or intelligence required to wisely preside over an entire country for the last eighteen years. But now, it is Yolanda's turn to manage this vast estate. Regrettably, the nuns at the convent have not prepared her for business, and more to the point, to recognize the conniving entrapment of a money-hungry swindler like Johnny Parkson Riggs (Fred Astaire). Johnny and Victor Trout (Frank Morgan), his inept partner in crime, are travelling incognito to avoid arrest for their spurious dealing, states side. As Victor astutely points out, Patria has no extradition laws. Ergo, it is the perfect hideaway. Furthermore, the relative isolation of this quaint hamlet makes it ideal for Victor and Johnny to go to work on new corruptions that will fatten their wallets.

Yolanda is an obvious pigeon, dulcet and trusting, convinced by Johnny that he is the earthly incarnation of her very own guardian angel. Without much contradiction, or even intervention from anyone else for that matter, Johnny relieves Yolanda of her fortunes by getting her to sign away her power of attorney. Unexpectedly, she develops a sycophantic attachment to Johnny that is more lost, desperate child in search of a father figure, rather than blossoming young woman in love with a man. Johnny is unscrupulous to the core - his repeated manipulations of this green girl making him a wholly unsympathetic character, all the more patronizing and tiresome as the story progresses. In the lobby of their hotel, Johnny and Victor verbally spar with Mr. Candle (Leon Ames), a man they misperceive to be even more enterprising than themselves. Candle goads Johnny, though not necessarily to the destiny he has planned. That evening, Johnny suffers a nightmare, and, Vincente Minnelli has his dream sequence in which our...uh...hero?... must confront his fears of wedlock and his growing, almost hypnotic attraction to the fair Yolanda. One can see shades of Minnelli's good taste scattered throughout this lengthy, misshapen ballet. Yet, at every turn the director seems unable to fully flesh out, or even reconcile Johnny's dilemma through this disjointed clap-trap of images haphazardly flung together.

If anything, the ballet illustrates Minnelli's glaring weakness for creatively going off the rails when given carte blanche by the studio, quite incapable of reigning in his own self-indulgences to compliment this simple story. Inexplicably, the ballet is interrupted midway with 'Will You Marry Me?' - one of the worst (if not, the worst) songs ever written by composer/producer, Arthur Freed. The lyric is trite and thoroughly out of context with the rest of the rhythmic Latin beats. Trapped in Yolanda’s saffron-tinted veils, Johnny awakens in a cold sweat, but is virtually unchanged in his motives. After signing away her family's fortunes to him, Yolanda finagles 'a date' with Johnny for the carnival. Very reluctantly, he agrees, then quickly finds himself embroiled in a pseudo-theologian discussion about Michael, the arch angel. Yolanda's superficial understanding of the Bible and Johnny's utter lack of knowledge makes for some pretty silly conversation. Mr. Candle oversees the couple as they segue into 'Coffee Time'; a repurposed Arthur Freed song that is more firmly rooted in Tin Pan Alley than genuine Hispanic culture, but is nevertheless the singular musical highlight in this movie. Set against a very glossy monochromatic floor, Minnelli fills the vertical plain with a panacea of garishly colored dancers, before clearing the arena for Yolanda - in her sunshine yellow ensemble - and Johnny - in his soft pastel blue suit - performing a very energetic pas deux.

Afterward, Johnny and Victor make for the last train out of Patria. They are informed by Candle that if the train crosses the border both will be arrested. Johnny has only one choice - to go legit, return to Patria and marry Yolanda. Only as her husband can he satisfy his earthly lust for money and Yolanda's more connubial yearning to mate with the man she has thus far misperceived to be her ever-loyal spirit guide. Yet, even as this plan is laid out by Candle, Johnny's selfishness cannot grasp its importance beyond pleasing himself. Johnny and Yolanda are married in a lavish ceremony at the convent and Candle finally reveals to them both he has always been their guardian angel. Yolanda and the Thief was to have been Lucille Bremer's big MGM musical debut, following her brief appearance as Rose Smith in Minnelli's Meet Me In St. Louis (1944) and later, as the silent - but sultry - dance partner for Astaire in two dramatic dance sequences staged by Minnelli for Ziegfeld Follies. If anything, Yolanda and the Thief proves Bremer could not sustain an entire movie as its leading lady. Or perhaps, it was simply the material herein that betrayed her talents; Bremer’s turn as the haughty princess in the ‘This Heart of Mine’ sequence from Ziegfeld Follies (a musical vignette in which Astaire once again plays a wily con, determined to steal from a wealthy aristocrat, but is instead entangled by the chords – and cords – of true love) illustrating a far more mature Bremer, capably assured and strikingly handsome.

That Yolanda and the Thief marked the end, rather than the beginning, of Bremer's all too brief career aspirations in Hollywood, came as something of a mild letdown to Minnelli, who had invested a great deal of his own visionary craftsmanship in practically every last detail of this movie. And, it must be stated that from a purely visual perspective, Yolanda and the Thief is a mesmerizing feast for the eyes, with Charles Rosher's gorgeous cinematography hauntingly surreal, yet strangely evocative of some forgotten Latino paradise recreated by Cedric Gibbons and Jack Martin Smith’s production design. Alas, the characters here are wooden and warped. Astaire is too callous and wicked to be redeemed. Bremer remains the much misguided innocent unaware of Johnny's loveless intensions towards her. There is no spark of romance between them either - merely the incongruous mating of two emotionally challenged people, arguably, doomed to grow more distant and bored with one another almost immediately after the last handful of rice has been pitched. The dream sequence, an even more disturbing phantasm than the rest of this probing exercise into romantic fantasy, is a grotesque foreshadowing of this awkward union’s fateful future. But the ballet intrudes on the story rather than augmenting it, and, interpolated with Freed’s bouncy but dull ditty, ‘Will You Marry Me?’ makes NO sense - fantastical or otherwise - not even within the fancifully premised context of the story.

And then, there is the score. This being a musical - and one of MGM's most expensively mounted to date - we expect another superlative grouping of memorable ballads and dance sequences that MGM was well known for by this time. Furthermore, the casting of Fred Astaire seems to warrant lavish production numbers in glorious Technicolor. But no. Yolanda and The Thief is sparse, almost cruelly, on its musical program. The film opens with Patria's National Anthem - an insipid sing-song trilled by a boy's soprano choral. From this rather innocuous beginning we wait nearly twenty minutes for the next interlude, 'Angel'; a perversely sexual beguine, warbled by Bremer as she bathes and is then dressed by a small army of ladies in waiting. Given that the veneer of Johnny's deception is never entirely shattered in our protagonist's mind, Astaire's performance of 'Yolanda' is strangely lighthearted, yet lustful at the same time. Regrettably, apart from the aforementioned 'Coffee Time' and an all too brief tap routine tacked onto the end of 'Yolanda', Astaire keeps his feet firmly on the ground. Even the ballet provides too few opportunities. Astaire spends most of the plot scurrying about these papier mâché rock formations, observing Yolanda and her courtiers from a respectful distance. In all, Yolanda and The Thief's score is arguably the most anemic of any Arthur Freed Unit musical - save, maybe, I Dood It (1943). Worse, the songs are eclipsed by Minnelli's overpowering visual style that tends to clutter up the screen. At any rate, Yolanda and the Thief was a costly gamble that, in hindsight, condemned MGM's blind faith in their wunderkind director's ability to pull things together. Unfortunately, the film's dull plot and cavalcade of wholly unlikable characters proved too great a hurdle for even Minnelli's artistry to conquer. Critical reaction to the picture was mixed. But audiences turned a cold shoulder to Yolanda and The Thief. It became the first unqualified financial bomb for both Freed and Minnelli. Still Minnelli did not learn his lesson. It would take the commercial flop of another musical experiment - The Pirate (1948) to convince him that his particular brand of back lot magic was perhaps a tad too sublime and too ultra-sophisticated for the general public's more standardized tastes.

Yolanda and the Thief is a Warner Archive MOD DVD release, and although not advertised as 'restored' or 'remastered' the print is in very fine shape. Age-related artifacts are the biggest complaint, but even these are fairly rare. We get a lovely Technicolor image that glows richly from the screen. Surprisingly too, the visuals are crisp without appearing digitally harsh and there are no instances of 3-strip color negative mis-registration. Contrast is excellent and a light smattering of film grain lends credence to this being a relative ‘new’ scan from very well-preserved archival elements. So, visually, this is a quality affair. The audio is 1.0 Dolby mono and also sounding excellent for its vintage. The only extra is a badly worn theatrical trailer. Bottom line: Yolanda and the Thief is for Minnelli and Astaire completionists only. While valiantly striven to enter the pantheon of great MGM musicals, it remains little more than a glossy, if gargantuanly disappointing footnote. Regrets.

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

2.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

3.5

EXTRAS

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