When movies began to talk a whole new vista of motion pictures opened up with the musical. Not that musical properties hadn't been done before, most famously Rudolf Friml's Rose Marie was done as a silent film with Joan Crawford in the lead. The Student Prince was also done with Norma Shearer. But singing and dancing was something new and it's no accident that the first talking film, The Jazz Singer was a musical.The guy who made the best musicals back in those days was Florenz Ziegfeld. One of his best was the operetta Rio Rita which ran for 494 performances in 1927-1928. Since the setting was the west, to be exact the Texas-Mexican border, we essentially get the screen's first musical western.Rio Rita was the newly formed RKO Studios big budget film for 1929 and it starred John Boles and Bebe Daniels and Rio Rita was her talking picture debut. She surprised the world with a really nice soprano voice doing those Harry Tierney-Joseph McCarthy songs. Boles was one film's earliest singers and he does the famous Ranger song with gusto in the best Nelson Eddy manner. The other big song from the score was the title song that is sung as a duet with Boles and Daniels. Bebe's best solo number is an item that Tierney and McCarthy wrote specifically for the screen, You're Always In My Arms.Repeating their roles from the stage show are the comedy team of Wheeler and Woolsey who also make their screen debut as well. The team itself was a creation of Florenz Ziegfeld and he used them in one of his Ziegfeld Follies editions. They're involved in a subplot about playboy Wheeler getting a Mexican divorce and getting into the clutches of a shyster attorney in Woolsey. I could see that both of them were individual performers because Bert Wheeler gets himself a fine song and dance number in Out On The Loose. He was quite the dancer, something we rarely saw in his comedy films with Robert Woolsey. Still it was as a team that they have come down to us.The main plot involved Texas Ranger captain John Boles going across the border to ferret out and apprehend a bandit called El Kinkajou and finding romance with Bebe Daniels. Like the first version of Rose Marie though his main suspect is her brother and Texas Rangers like Canadian Mounties put duty first.The film is a photographed stage musical essentially, just like the first two Marx Brothers films, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers. But the opulence of a Ziegfeld Show is preserved and that is the main reason to see Rio Rita. The last half hour is in color and we can thank the Deity that was preserved. So for film historians and those who want a glimpse at the showmanship of Florenz Ziegfeld, don't miss Rio Rita when broadcast.

Lovely old musical based on a smash 1927 Broadway show produced by Flo Ziegfeld.Stale plot but it doesn't matter what with great leads by John Boles and Bebe Daniels. Nonsense about a bunch of vigilantes seeking the notorious "Kinkajou." But the songs are terrific and both Boles and Daniels have great voices. It must have been a big surprise to film fans to see Bebe Daniels in this film. She had been a star for a decade and emerged as the great singer. Their duet on "Rio Rita" is excellent.Along for the ride (and from the Broadway play) are Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey (their film debut) who are very funny here. Contrary to general knowledge, they were NOT a vaudeville team. They had never even met before being hired for the Broadway production. But RIO RITA started a long and very funny teaming of the two in many films.Dorothy Lee is also good in this film as the "boop-a-doop" voiced girl friend of Wheeler. Their duet on "Sweetheart, We Need Each Other" is a delight and when they break into a tap dance routine, they are just perfect. Lee (in her second film) is especially good, but I don't remember much dancing from her other films.The existing 104-minute print is from the cut down 1932 re-release of the film. The original 140-minute version is not known to exist, although a complete print once existed at New York's Museum of Modern Art.The pirate ship finale was filmed in 2-strip Technicolor and exists. Also in the cast are Helen Kaiser as Mrs. Bean, Don Alvarado as Roberto, Georges Renavent as the general, Eva Rosita as Carmen, and Richard Alexander as Gonzales.

What a lot of movie buffs may not be aware of is the surprise and delight that the movie audiences of 1929 felt when they first heard Bebe Daniels's singing voice on the silver screen. By the time sound pictures began to appear, Daniels had already been a major silent film star for years, most notably headlining in romantic comedies for Paramount. She was quite popular with audiences, and she was considered a real beauty, too. Yet before the advent of sound, screen audiences (for the most part) didn't know what her voice sounded like... They could only imagine. So at a time when the arrival of sound sometimes killed the careers of heretofore popular movie stars, many so-called "hot" personalities found their personas diminished on the talking screen. Not so with Daniels. No matter what people might have been expecting before the lights went down and the sound came on, as it turned out, in "Rio Rita", her singing voice was nothing short of a sensation. Teaming her with the incredibly handsome John Boles was a nice bit of casting, too, because he too was blessed with a wonderful singing voice. Their "duet in counterpoint" at the beginning of the film (he sings the title tune while she sings "River of My Dreams") must have been a revelation, and one can almost imagine the theatre audiences swooning when it was first heard in 1929. So no matter what others may tell you about this "Rita", the thing to keep in mind is that with almost all of these early talkies, the viewers today who will appreciate them the most are those who can project themselves back in time when they watch them.

The Kinkajou dance lead by Dorothy Lee is a gem. Dorothy Lee has a white 10 gal. hat on an 8 gal. head, curtesy of a prop man with a strange sense of humor, and looks a bit like a mushroom but it only makes the dance more fun as she tries to keep it on. I wish this part was shown more often with the film.