Week-End in Havana
                                                                             
Director: Walter Lang
Year: 1941
Rating: 5.5
The Fox musical department was in full blast mode in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Their two female headliners Alice Faye and Betty Grable were enormously popular and nearly a carbon copy of one another. They had just added Carmen Miranda from Brazil who gave the films a strong shot of adrenaline that they needed though it is easy to get too much of her.  June Haver and Vivian Blaine were the stars in the smaller musical productions. All of them wholesome entertainment for the family audience. But Fox never was able to develop male talent to the same degree for some reason and so the ladies get stuck with the likes of John Payne, Dan Dailey and Don Ameche. They could all dance a bit of soft-shoe - Dailey in particular - and sing a bit but it was the women who carried the show. Fox had a strong production team of song writers, choreographers and set and clothes designers. All the films had a similar lavish glossy Technicolor sheen about them. Everyone looks fabulous in them with wonderful attire and perfect skin.



This one begins with Carmen Miranda doing a number with what looks like five pounds of lost and found on her head. She sizzles as only she could do. She dominates the musical aspects of the film leaving Alice Faye with only a few lowkey songs. Miranda was the new bright shiny thing. At times you wish they would decaffeinate her. It is a paper-thin plot that never grabs your heart-strings. A cruise ship has gone aground and the company sends John Payne down to get release forms from all the passengers so they won't sue. Easy from of them except one. A solo woman on her vacation from working at Macy's. She won't give it. You have to make it up to me, she tells him. He gets orders to give her a good time in Havana. Which the actors never came within a thousand miles of. So, Payne gives her the Presidential Suite that is larger than a tugboat and decides he has to show her a good time.



Not a bad assignment since she is Alice Faye with those startling blue-eyes that look like robin's eggs. Technicolor dreams. But he is engaged back home to the boss's daughter (Cobina Wright) who smells of money and privilege. And he can't give Faye the romance she desires, this poor Macy shop-girl. She wants love and romance but definitely no sex and finds it in the arms of a slick Latin lothario, played by Cesar Romero. There was a bit of a Latin craze going on in America at the time - in music, in women and in men - and actors like Cesar and Ricardo Montalban were signed up. He is also a gigolo who was tipped off by the bellboy (Leonid Kinskey) at the hotel that she is rich. He has debts to pay. He takes her gambling, she loses and it comes out she is not a rich heiress. I work at Macy's. Ah, you own Macy's. No. Hosiery. Payne decides to pay Cesar to romance her. But no sex.



When the inevitable happens and Payne kisses her, my stomach did a soggy back flip. That they fall for each other was as believable as men landing on the moon. There is zero chemistry between them - he is as stiff as a wooden post - but the film looks great, the Latin tinged songs from Warren and Gordon are fine and the musical staging by Hermes Pan looks great.  It just needed a beating heart. It is directed by Walter Lang, often overlooked these days, but he was a mainstay for Fox and their musicals at the time - this, Tin Pan Alley, Moon Over Miami, Song of the Islands, Coney Island and Greenwich Village.