You’ll go bananas for the new Carmen Miranda boxed DVD set
By ROBERT W. BUTLER
The Kansas City Star
Spending a day watching Carmen Miranda movies is like dropping LSD in a supermarket produce department.
You’ll never look at an orange in the same way again.
In the early ’40s the fruit-draped Miranda (1909-1955) was America’s highest-paid entertainer.
Yet watching the new “Carmen Miranda Collection” boxed set, due out Tuesday (suggested retail price: $49.98), you realize that even when she got top billing, the “Brazilian Bombshell” wasn’t a leading lady.
Instead she was Hollywood’s most reliable female second banana — an eye-rolling comedian (her rubber-faced style was later appropriated by Lucille Ball) who could be relied upon to spice up an assembly-line musical with one of her mind-boggling samba numbers.
The plots of her movies invariably involved a pretty young thing (usually Vivian Blaine) who sings of romance while her best friend — Miranda — cavorts crazily on the edges of the story. Yet so potent was Miranda’s comic persona, so completely did audiences embrace her wild-woman Latin American sensibilities, that she was the reason most of these movies got made.
This collection offers five features Miranda starred in for 20th Century Fox: “The Gang’s All Here” (1943), “Greenwich Village” (’44), “Something for the Boys” (’44), “Doll Face” (’46) and “If I’m Lucky” (’46).
In most respects these films are interchangeable, sharing narrative elements and stock characters. All are backstage yarns in which Miranda and a group of hard-working entertainers overcome adversity to put on the BIG SHOW.
But one thing you can count on — in every case this English-mangling import is the most watchable thing on the screen.
For an example of her comic genius, check out a running gag in “Something for the Boys” in which Miranda’s character — ditzy in the best of circumstances — starts picking up radio broadcasts through her fillings.
But it was her musical sensibilities that made her a screen icon. Moving rhythmically atop towering platform shoes, her head encased in a gewgaw-bedecked turban or skullcap, she was a sassy, mugging, rhumba-ing ball of energy.
She was already bigger than life when Busby Berkeley directed her in “The Gang’s All Here.” But the mating of Berkeley’s hallucinogenic staging and Miranda’s out-there persona makes for some of the most entertaining footage ever to come out of Hollywood.
Just check out the Freudian vision of dozens of chorus girls dancing with six-foot bananas, or the overhead shot that turns Miranda and her fellow performers into an ambulatory fruit salad. There were moments watching this utterly ridiculous and totally enjoyable movie when I found myself laughing for the sheer joy pouring off the screen.
Extras here include a very good documentary about Miranda’s life and career (as beloved as she was by the public, she struggled to find satisfying romance in her personal life), several commentaries by film historians and photo galleries.
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