Diagonaldi Very well executed

Tockinit not horrible nor great

Skunkyrate Gripping story with well-crafted characters

Calum Hutton It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

krdement This movie is burdened mostly by poor pacing. The first half of the film is a long string of diverse musical numbers connected by a few lines of dialog. Then the director seemed to realize that some kind of plot development was necessary, so the musical numbers are few and far between in the second half of the movie, which is dedicated to getting the flimsy plot moving. Then there's the grand finale with Jane Powell delivering a beautiful rendition of "Ave Maria."Not once did I feel like I was in Mexico City. Believe it or not, you will see more keffiyehs than sombreros in this movie! Maybe the director thought it was Holiday in Morocco. However, some of the costumes are beautiful - especially some of Jane Powell's dresses.Walter Pidgeon, who I usually like, is only fair in his role as the US Ambassador to Mexico and an all-wise, empathetic and loving, but somewhat condescending father. Jane Powell has a beautiful voice, but her acting is erratic and bordering on manic in some of the early scenes. Jose Iturbi never was an actor, but had a film career based solely on his being an excellent pianist. Ilona Massey is, likewise, not a great actress, but she is beautiful and hot. Roddy MacDowell has such a high-pitched, soft voice, it is hard for me to ever find him very convincing as a serious love-interest, even as a teenager. At the end of the day, every minute of this film seems like it is populated not by real people, but by actors playing roles.If you like a fairly wide range of music, then the first part of this movie will delight you. I personally wanted to come up for more air between musical numbers. The two best scenes are in the second half. The funniest scene is between Pidgeon and the parents of one of his daughter's girlfriends. It is the cleverest plot device in a plot riddled with every cinematic cliché of the era, and it is quite ironic, with Pidgeon discovering he is the object of the affections of the young daughter of one of his ambassadorial colleagues.The penultimate scene in which Pidgeon talks frankly with Powell, his daughter, about facing up to life after you've made a fool of yourself is worth wading through the trite plot, clichés and front-loaded music. And her response, as depicted in the climactic scene is suitably uplifting.Spreading the musical numbers more evenly throughout the film, and developing the plot in a more even manner, too, would have improved this film quite a bit. As it is, it is more like sitting through two performances - first, a short concert, followed by a short film.

Tikki-Bo This film is so good that I want to own it. Jane Powell was 16 when she hit MGM with this bomb shell performance as the daughter of the Ambassador of the USA to Mexico in Mexico City. Just compare this to the current crop of films about teen agers of this year, 2006.Her delivery of crystal clear singing in a slightly opera trained voice is beautiful like a carillon tower's bells. Jose Iturbi's piano is an added treat. No nude scenes, no profanity, no miserable bed room scenes misdirected and miscast and massacred just great comedy and very classy acting all around. The 16 year old Jane has the prettiest blue eyes seen in a long time. I saw this movie with my mom back in the 40's and now in the 21st Century it is even better. This is one you won't be afraid to show your kids and it will bring back a lot of long forgotten memories.

rberrong-1 This is basically a bad movie, one in which the sum of the parts is definitely less than the parts themselves. It throws together without ever fusing them into one coherent whole 1) José Iturbi, who plays a Hollywood version of Rachmaninoff's Second Concerto for piano and Chopin's Military Polonaise, 2) Xavier Cougat and his orchestra doing what they did, 3) Ilona Massey being very beautiful and singing into the bargain, and 4) Jane Powell. Powell evidently couldn't act - though this script doesn't really provide any opportunity to do so - but she could sing light classical music, and in this movie she was given music to sing that really showed off her voice (Bizet's Les filles de Cadiz, Herbert's Italian Street Song, etc.). It serves as something of an explanation of what went wrong subsequently, when MGM and then RKO put Powell into movies where she was asked to sing the popular music of the era. She never sounded particularly at ease with the popular music, and never did a particularly good job of singing it. Since she wasn't an actress, when what she was singing wasn't interesting, there was nothing to attract audiences. But this movie shows that, had Hollywood continued to give her music appropriate to her voice, her later movies might not have been so forgettable. As it is, this movie is like a vaudeville show: it presents a series of well-done musical numbers connected, feebly, by a script that is best forgotten. If you like Iturbi, or Massey, or Powell, you'll like their numbers. (Did anyone really like Xavier Cougat?) You can go make popcorn during the rest of it and not miss anything.

gwenearnold My husband and I had the pleasure of attending Jose Iturbi's concerts in San Antonio and Austin, Texas; also, my husband was fortunate to hear sister Ampara Iturbi while stationed on Trinidad during WWII, so I always rewatch these old films with great nostalgia. As an amateur pianist I did so enjoy all the music in this film. Calypso, boogie woogie, and classical...something for anyone who enjoys music. Yes, the plots of these old movies were always simplistic, but they make such good clean time-passers, particularly amid the sleaze presented to us on TV and in film today. I am so glad they have been preserved and that we have channels devoted to them. They take me back to happy times.