December 15 movie: Yolanda and the Thief. Fred Astaire plays a con man who tricks a Latin American heiress (Lucille Bremer) into believing he's her guardian angel so he can bilk her out of millions. Except she really does have a guardian angel. Who guilts Astaire into giving the money back, and then orders him to marry her. Weird movie!
Not nearly enough dancing, almost no singing. And Astaire seemed to have been studying at the Gene Kelly school of choreography, because the biggest number was one of those awful dream sequences that stop the movie dead in its tracks and don't even have that much dancing. Also, Astaire was getting to the age where his wooing a teenager (the actress clearly wasn't, but the character was fresh out of convent school) was a little creepy. Even more creepy was the girl's position as de facto ruler of the fictional tiny Latin American country. Her family's corporate holdings controlled practically the entire GNP, and the peasants treated her like a demigoddess. So Astaire married his way into ownership of a corporate nation-state. How romantic!
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