HOLIDAY IN MEXICO

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 396, 24 January 1947, Page 27

HOLIDAY IN MEXICO

(M.G.M.)

[Tt might be interesting to compare the impression of Mexico which we were given in the native-made Portrait of Maria with the picture-post-

card, tourist-eye view of that country which we get in this new musical. Interesting, but not exactly profitable, for Portrait of Maria was a real picture and this is just a mess. Joe Pasternak, who produced Holiday in Mexico, clearly has the intention of building the new starlet, Jane Powell, into a second Deanna Durbin. He goes abour this task by presenting her as the precocious bobbysox daughter of the American Ambassador to Mexico, and involving her in embarrassingly callow romantic complications with a famous musician much older than herself (Jose Iturbi), and the British Ambassador’s young son (Roddy McDowall). Meanwhile. her father the Ambassador conducts a_ sedate loveaffair with a Hungarian refugee (Ilona Massey). Jane Powell sings, Ilona Massey sings, Iturbi plays the piano, and Xavier Cugat and his band dispense rumbas. Roddy McDowall’s portrayal is almost an insult to the English, and I find it hard to believe that the U.S. State Department can be completely happy about Walter Pidgeon’s representation of a high American diplomat. The film is in lush Technicolour, with wed-ding-cake settings, and it lasts-believe it or not-127 minutes. In fact, adapting (but with apologies to nobody) what somebody else once wrote in other circumstances, I would say that if I were not by nature a mild sort of person I could be almost rude about Holiday in Mexico. As it is, I shall, with remarkable restraint, confine myself to remarking that I found it cheap, flashy, stupid, vulgarly ostentatious, profligate, raucous, infantile, meretricious, tasteless, shallow, embarrassing, outrageously long-winded and wearisome.