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A Busby Berkeley number kicks things off, Betty Grable regales the audience at a girls' cavernous dormitory conveniently equipped with shimmering pool and corkscrew slide. "Will you please turn your head while we get out of bed?" The cuckoo in the nest is the collegiate saphead (Eddie Cantor), the prank gets him along with his roommate (Robert Young) expelled, off to Mexico they go—the goofball to escape after becoming an unwitting robbery accomplice, the would-be Latin lover to seek his childhood sweetheart (Ruth Hall). The torero disguise to dodge the cops is just a lateral move: "You got me away from one bull with handcuffs and onto another bull with horns!" A silly grin before the firing squad (cf. Hiller's The In-Laws), a giant sombrero for the balcony serenade, obligatory blackface shenanigans, Cantor in full flight. (Lyda Roberti more than matches him as a sort of libidinous peroxide Papagena.) "Don't look at me, I'm half-undressed." "That's okay, I'll keep one eye closed." Given a choice of death by pistol or knife, the hero chooses strawberries, why not. Leo McCarey buoyancy, Gregg Toland camera, Kalmar-Ruby songs ahead of Duck Soup. The human tortilla made of dancing chorines, the key down the maiden's décolletage "between Tijuana and the border." All is resolved by confronting the bovine behemoth in the arena, a bit of chloroform and slow-motion does the trick for the benefit of The Three Stooges in What's the Matador? "Did I ask you?" "Did I tell you?" With John Miljan, Noah Beery, J. Carrol Naish, Robert Emmett O'Connor, Stanley Fields, Paul Porcasi, and Sidney Franklin. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |