Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Such a frustrating disappointment

Pretty Good

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

This is a VERY nice musical fantasy about a couple of thieves (Fred Astaire and Frank Morgan) going through a very rich mythical country and trying to steal money from an innocent, recently-in-a-convent young woman (Lucille Bremer). The mythical country looks like it might be somewhere in the northern part of South America (Bolivia, Peru, or Columbia???), but that's up to us to guess. It's mythical after all...... So what's Leon Ames's role in the movie? You will have to see it and find out. This is a nice musical in beautiful color with lavish sets and costumes and good production numbers. Lucille Bremer is not a household name because she retired from show biz after getting married.

Just came from a full screen showing of Yolanda & the Thief at the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto. This movie has long been a cult favorite of mine. I use the term "cult" because Yolanda is seldom mentioned in the same breath with so many of Arthur Freed's other MGM musicals. Few people have even heard of it. I have a bootleg Beta copy but you won't find a VHS version and certainly not a DVD. Somehow the fantasy element skews the movie's appeal despite its lush pallet, the full throttle performances, and the campiest mis en scene to emerge from Hollywood in the 40s. The opening shot: Sunrise in a field in Patria, a nation that may be a combination of Peru and Bolivia (only without the poverty, the politics or the bad weather) high in a cardboard rendering of the Andes. School children have gathered for class. The teacher is a wise old man who uses a llama as a back rest. The boys (yes, they're all boys) are attentive, well-behaved, and ethnic. Even the tow head in the first row has enough pancake makeup to pass for a native. So what? We're there to learn about the Aquaviva family... rich, benevolent, monopolistic, off beat, the family runs Patria and controls the oil, the beef, the transportation (Pan Aquaviva Airlines). But do we cue the Commies to start marching in the streets, protesting the plight of the poor? No, the Patrianos (or whatever they call themselves) are too busy dancing and singing and selling trinkets to care about their oppression. We are in a world that existed exclusively in the heads of Vincent Minnelli and his production crew. The colors are bright and bold: Emerald greens, umber translucent skies, golden gowns. Minelli's directorial style is a kind of in your face bravado with crane shots for days (true sometimes they get a little bumpy but high altitudes will do that to you). No doubt the writers got their idea of Patria while visiting the bar at the Agua Caliente race track in Tijuana, or taking lunch breaks at Olvera Street. Don't see this movie for its politics (there are none) or the geography (the back lot of MGM) or cultural authenticity (the female vendors in the town plaza wear hats that resemble Bolivian bowlers with colors by Irene). Yolanda and the Thief is truly sui generis. There's never been anything like it before and there hasn't been anything like it since. Minelli made Y&TF and broke the mold. (One question: Who's the guy that keeps bumming cigarettes off Fred?)

Vincent Minnelli loves pure beauty, and in "Yolanda and the Thief" he's in heaven.Here he has the unbridled luxury of reveling in rich colors, stylish costumes, imaginative dream sequences, and a carnival dance scene that's breathtaking.With Arthur Freed and Harry Warren's tuneful songs, music supervision by Roger Edens and direction by Lennie Hayton, the score simply glows. Right from the start, "This is a Day for Love" spans a colorful countryside, moving into a processional and to a lovely convent setting. At midpoint, there's a fantasy through cobblestone streets, to a "magical" pond (from which a remarkable "apparition" emerges) to a multileveled plane with assorted choreographic groupings.This complex fantasy undoubtedly inspired Gene Kelly six years later in developing his great ballet sequence of "An American in Paris." The expansive MGM sound stages are fully utilized in both executions to their fullest.Then the show-stopping "Coffee Time" choreography by Eugen Loring, and deftly danced by Fred Astaire, Lucille Bremer and company, is a masterpiece of concept and execution.Starting off with a lone female trio stepping and clapping off-beat in 5/4, a startling 4/4 song is suddenly superimposed upon the "ground"--with dance and clap movements clearly continuing in 5/4. To add to the "tour de force, a slower pas de deux emerges in the irregular meter, only to be followed by the corps' return to the regular, with everything "taken out" in combined meters. It's really something to see this dance, which is obviously the result of many weeks of painstaking work from a number of departments, so smoothly executed. Astaire is on top of his form, with Bremer right there every step of the way. They make as beautiful a pair here as in the lovely "This Heart of Mine" number from "Ziegfield Follies." As for Minnelli, he must have been ecstatic throughout this picturesque production. Mildred Natwick shines in her hilarious role as Aunt, and Frank Morgan and Leon Ames provide able support. The script itself is a serviceable backdrop for the art departments' joining the music team in having a field day crafting a very beautiful production. As for Minnelli, this was certainly among his happiest hours in filmmaking.

If Yolanda and the Thief isn't the damnedest thing ever committed to film, it's hard to say what is. Vincente Minnelli took a wisp of whimsey from Ludwig Bemelmans and turned it into this overblown fantasy musical that pushes the flap of the envelope wide open.Most musicals – the best of them, anyway – grow out of show business lore and derive their pluck and sass from the raffish traditions of show-must-go-on troupers. But Yolanda and the Thief invents a Latin-American Ruritania (called Patria, or fatherland) out of stereotypes which verge on the offensive but stay simperingly coy. It's a kind of squeaky-clean utopia of the clueless Lost Horizon sort run by a benevolent family of oligarchs called the Aquavivas.Their only daughter (Lucille Bremer), having reached her majority, leaves the convent school where she is allowed to wear full Hollywood makeup. The vast family fortune becomes hers to administer with the help of a dotty aunt (Mildred Natwick, and the best thing in the movie). Alas, the good sisters have not equipped her to cope with the wicked ways of the world, as personified by a couple of American con-artists (Fred Astaire and Frank Morgan) who arrange an introduction and plan to abscond with a sizeable chunk of her assets. Astaire poses as an angel for the impressionable girl, and almost gets away with it, except he – inevitably – falls for her. Plus, on the fringes of the action, a real angel operates.... Harmless enough piffle, but get a load of the musical numbers. Full-tilt phantasmagorias that look like Busby Berkeley on acid or crystal or absinthe, they get bigger and more grandiose and ever loonier, with colors so brash that sunglasses are in order (was this the first head movie?). The set and costume designers must have had field day, what with Minnelli extending them a carte blanche they certainly never had before and would never have again until the debut of the music video. But the songs stay resolutely uninspired, which takes the starch out of the dancing (even much of Astaire's). It's safe to say nobody strode out of the theaters in 1945 whistling snappy tunes from Yolanda and the Thief.It's not exactly fun to watch but you can't take your eyes off it, either. A one-of-a-kind Technicolor extravaganza, it makes you wonder how – not to say why – it ever got made. Astaire's reputation must have taken a nosedive after its release, and as for Bremer? She makes you long for Ginger Rogers – even the very late Ginger Rogers.