Rio [DVD]

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Director Carlos Saldanda certainly made a fast paced adventure with a great amount of velvet colour. Maybe original film elements weren’t available in this case, but I can offer no definitive explanation.

Instead of exploring any of these ideas, the last third of the picture becomes depressingly conventional, with Reynaud indeed escaping with another prisoner (Irving Bacon), though just how he breaks out isn’t even shown. Born in Brooklyn but raised in Norway and other parts of Europe, she was dubbed “the Norwegian Garbo,” though her singing in Rio is rather more like sub-Marlene Dietrich. Rathbone plays Paul Reynaud, a Bernie Madoff-type Parisian financier arrested for embezzlement and forgery, causing a huge scandal in France’s banking industry and rampant personal bankruptcies among Paris’s millionaires, some of whom commit suicide. Rock in Rio is a recurring music festival held at the City of Rock (Cidade do Rock) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. My personal favourites were the double act Kipo (Robin Thicke) and Marcel (Carlos Ponce) who were the dumb henchmen for the poacher and outsmarted by a cockatoo.Rathbone may have been attracted to its very un-Rathboney aspects—at one point for instance, he’s filthy and bare-chested, hacking his way through swampy jungles with a machete—but the script lets him down. It has a few interesting qualities, and Rathbone is good if theatrical in an unusual role, but the film is very minor and the video transfer unexpectedly below Universal’s average for black-and-white films of this vintage (for various Blu-ray labels). Directed by John Brahm and starring Basil Rathbone, Rio (1939) is a crime melodrama that begins with some promise, but collapses utterly toward the end, with a climax that neatly wraps everything up according to Production Code guidelines.

Bill falls in love with Irene, sobers up and is revitalized by an irrigation project, but she’s unwilling to abandon her imprisoned husband. When Blu, a domesticated macaw from small-town Minnesota, meets the fiercely independent Jewel, he takes off on an adventure to Rio de Janeiro with the bird of his dreams.When their escape Blu and Jewel they try and reunite with Linda whilst avoiding being captured by the poachers and their insane cockatoo Nigel (Jemaine Clement). The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used except with the prior written permission of The Digital Bits, Inc. She made a big splash in Algiers and The Adventures of Marco Polo (both 1938, that latter also starring Rathbone), but made few films after, the best known being the interesting Three Faces West (1940) with John Wayne. On one hand, it’s great to see movies as obscure as Rio getting the Blu-ray treatment, and with an audio commentary yet, but the film is minor and ultimately a disappointment.

The animation of the parrots climbing is particularly well done and true to live to anyone who has ever own one. Both learn from each other, for Blu that there is a wider world and for Jewel that not all humans are bad. Much of the humour of the film is kid friendly slapstick as is expected from this type of film and it is done very well. Instead, Irene and Dirk travel to Rio de Janeiro—according to dialogue because it’s so close to the island penal colony. There she encounters alcoholic American engineer Bill Gregory (Robert Cummings), on an extended bender after a bridge he designed collapsed.Though I do question why ornithologists did not question why they had an injured cockatoo considering the species is native to Australia and New Guinea (but this is a minor issue). Rio is a pure formula picture and there are many elements have been in other films, such as Blu being taken from the wild as a chick, the animosity between Blu and Jewel and we all know where it is going to lead, the story of Nigel having a tragic past and being rejected, etc, etc…. Irene, meanwhile, has resumed her singing career, at Roberto’s Café, where Dirk works as a bartender. It claims to be derived from a new 2K master, but looks to my eyes more like a much older video master, with none of the impressive sharpness and inky blacks one can find in other Universal late-‘30s titles of the period, among them Son of Frankenstein and Tower of London, both 1939, both starring Rathbone.