Plot:
The film opens with an elaborately loving treatment of King Ferdinand’s triumphal entrance into Madrid. (He marches on “Spanish Street” and into “Verona Square,” sets built for the Shearer-Howard Romeo and Juliet and used for many years. “Spanish Street” was also used for Monterey in The Girl of the Golden West.) The people adore their young King, but the mood is somewhat dampened by the ominous presence of French troops.
At a conference, the crafty French General Savary (Henry Daniell) soothes the new Spanish king, Ferdinand (Tom Rutherfurd). He assures him the French troops are only occupying Spain to “protect” it from the English. Since all Napoleon wants is peace in Europe, a meeting between him and the king should take place as soon as possible. Watching the smirking French general and the ingenuous king is the steely-eyed Marquis DeMelito (Douglass Dumbrille, Jeanette’s tyrannical uncle in Naughty Marietta).
The festivities continue with dancing, feasting, and fireworks. In a nearby tavern, the star attraction is Nina Maria Azara, the “Mosca del Fuego” (a bizarre mistranslation of “firefly”). She is dazzling the customers, including many French officers. One of them, Etienne (Leonard Penn), is suspicious when Nina Maria (Jeanette) says she is too tired to see him after the show. He’ll kill anyone he finds with her, he warns. Since the Marquis DeMelito is picking her up, this is somewhat inconvenient.
She decides to make Etienne think her newest admirer is someone in the tavern. Singing “Love is Like a Firefly,” she spots a brash young Spaniard in the audience and flirts with him coyly from behind her fan. Don Diego (Allan Jones) responds joyously, singing “A Woman’s Kiss.” Nina Maria is delighted and, whirling about to the exciting melody, she obeys the lyrics by giving him a long kiss. Etienne is convinced of her faithlessness and Don Diego of her interest.
The Don pursues her to her dressing room, where she explains that she only kissed him to get rid of the French officer. Through the window, Don Diego spots Etienne lurking outside. She hasn’t succeeded. “I think you’d better try again,” he says, getting in position for another kiss.
Nina Maria begs him not to fight Etienne, who is an expert marksman, and departs to meet the Marquis. Lola, her hawk-faced maid (Belle Mitchell), sees Nina Maria and Don Diego to the door. “Good night, Senorita. Goodbye, Senor!”
Nina Maria’s “date” with the Marquis turns out to be business. She is using her job to get information from the French. The Marquis orders her to go to Bayonne, a French city near the Spanish border, where the conference between Napoleon and Ferdinand is to take place. He suspects a trap. Nina Maria readily accepts the assignment, although two agents have already been caught. The Marquis is pleased as always with his employee—no moods, no entanglements. “I can’t imagine any man as exciting as this service to my country,” she replies.
The next morning, her mule-driven coach is winding its way along a dusty mountain trail. The driver’s small son (Robert Spindola) hops out to urge the mules up a hill by playing on his flageolet. He dances ahead, whistling a jaunty melody on his small pipe. Suddenly the driver (Manuel Alvarez Maciste) spots a lone horseman silhouetted against the ridge. Bandits!
With Nina Maria and Lola clinging to each other in the swaying coach, they take off at full gallop. The rider descends the perilous mountainside at even greater speed and finally catches up with the frightened party. (Allan Jones—for it is Don Diego—rode his own horse for this sequence.)
Don Diego has come to tell Nina Maria that he didn’t fight the duel. He overslept. Nina Maria is furious at the fright he gave them and orders the driver to continue. Don Diego trots alongside as an uninvited escort. She picked him to get rid of the French officer, Nina Maria tells Lola, but how does she get rid of him?
Don Diego offers to sing to entertain her on the journey, but she tells him she is going to sleep. The driver’s small son again plays his “mule song.” To the clip-clop of their hooves, Don Diego sings the now-classic “Donkey Serenade,” written especially for the film. The catchy rhythms and counter-rhythms rouse even Nina Maria from her pretended slumber.
At the inn in Vittoria, their first night’s stop, she thanks Don Diego for making the journey so pleasant and says goodbye. In her room she is contacted by an agent who tells her the King has already started for the conference at Bayonne. If, as they suspect, a trap has been arranged, she is to send word through a poultry seller in the Bayonne market place.
The quiet evening Nina Maria has planned is interrupted by the persistent Don Diego. In a beautiful mood piece, they dine together and stroll through the moonlit garden, redolent with jasmine. She stops at the stable to check on her driver and then starts back to the inn. Diego delays her, seating her on a straw-covered cart. In an amusing interlude, he tries to convince her they are riding in a Venetian gondola. As proof, he sings the lushly romantic “Giannina Mia.” Her reserve softens in the fervent warmth of the music.
Reluctantly, she confesses that she was moved by his song. At the spot, just before the high note, she was wondering—but she’d better not tell him. He insists. “Just before the high note, I was wondering—” “Yes?” “I was wondering if you were going to make it!” More honestly, she tells him that perhaps when she returns from Bayonne she won’t be so discouraging.
One of Adrian’s loveliest costume designs for Jeanette who plays a
Spanish spy. She sings, “He Who Loves and Runs away,”
entrancing the French officers.
Bayonne is a dazzling triumph. In Miss MacDonald’s most exciting tour-de-force number since “San Francisco,” she thrills the French officers with “He Who Loves and Runs Away.” (Among the extras are director Robert Z. Leonard, choreographer Albertina Rasch, and future star Dennis O’Keefe.) Nina Maria has eyes only for a distinguished older man at a center table. As she sings, she happily fingers his brand new Colonel’s insignia. He is the one she wants.
Her flirtation is interrupted by the sudden entrance of Don Diego. Startled, she pulls herself together and responds to the military turn of the music by seizing the Colonel’s bicorn hat and cocking it fetchingly on her own head. She salutes him soldier-fashion, and then, as the officers’ voices take up the martial tattoo, she struts elegantly on the stage, the camera sweeping after her in a glorious moment of sight and sound.
As intended, Colonel De Rougemont (Warren William) attempts to retrieve his hat in the lady’s dressing room, but they are repeatedly interrupted by notes and flowers from the jealous Don Diego. However, the Colonel succeeds in making a luncheon date with Nina Maria—tête-à-tête. Nina Maria tells him she wants to hear all about Napoleon. “If you only knew how I felt about Napoleon,” she gushes.
Colonel De Rougemont (Warren William) is especially captivated by Nina Maria.
The next morning, Nina Maria stops at the stall of a poultry vendor (Maurice Black) to buy two pigeons—carrier pigeons for notifying the waiting Marquis DeMelito. She and Lola then stroll on among the vendors until they spot Don Diego trying on hats. One looks so comical that Nina Maria laughingly forgives him and consents to a sightseeing tour. He points out the house where Don Diego spent a night of torture after Nina Maria rebuffed him. “Funny, I don’t see a tablet,” she scoffs. They walk on, buying flowers, strawberries, and chestnuts from various stalls. Finally, crossing a rustic drawbridge, they settle on a bank beside a mill pond. Here director Leonard attempts a series of folksy cameos of French country types that comes off as unbearably arch.
Diego tells Nina Maria he doesn’t want her to have lunch with Colonel De Rougemont. She smiles at his jealousy and assures him the Colonel is a very important man. Diego admires the locket she is wearing. She opens it to show him pictures of her mother and father. They are dead, she says, killed twenty years before when the French invaded Spain. He thinks that should make her very bitter toward the French. “Oh, no,” she replies unconvincingly.
They toss the last of their chestnuts to the ducks, and Diego pretends to feed his finger to one obstreperous drake. Soothing his “injured” hand, she sings “Sympathy.”
Their little love scene is interrupted by Napoleon himself, marching into Bayonne. Nina Maria leaps up to keep her lunch engagement. Diego begs her not to go, but she insists. As a pledge of her love, she leaves him the locket, then rushes off to her apartment to change.
A message is waiting there from the Colonel. He is leaving Bayonne for several days and cannot keep their date. Nina Maria guesses he is on his way to Vittoria, the halfway point in King Ferdinand’s journey. He will promise Ferdinand anything to get him on French soil, but what are his orders if the king refuses to come?
She dresses in her loveliest frock and arrives at the Colonel’s apartment as he is packing. Coyly she serenades him on the spinet while he dresses in the next room: “When a Maid Comes Knocking.” The crucial dispatch arrives. She snatches it, playfully scolding it for taking the Colonel from her. Then, flinging herself into his arms, she manages to read the message through the envelope by the light of the window. (Quite a trick!) “Order for Arrest” is the heading.
Very reluctantly, the Colonel rides off. Nina Maria returns to her rooms to send this news to the Marquis. But the pigeons are not the ones she bought. Someone has switched their birds for hers. If she had sent the message, the French would have evidence against her.
Who can help her? Lola urges her to go to Don Diego. He can ride to Vittoria with the message. Nina Maria hesitates. Perhaps he is the one who is doing all this. Instead, she returns to the market place and learns the poultry seller has been taken away by the police. There is no one else to turn to.
From his window, Don Diego sees her coming. The Chief of the French secret police (George Zucco, the eternal villain) is at his elbow. Diego must get Nina Maria to confess while the Chief and his men hide in the next room. Grimly, Diego admits Nina Maria.
She makes tensely casual small talk, then asks him to deliver a message to Vittoria. He agrees, and she jots it down on a piece of paper. The paper is snatched from her hand by the gleeful Chief. But the message is a request for dinner reservations several days hence. Diego is revealed to be Captain François André of the secret police, who has been pursuing Nina Maria for months. Just to be sure the audience has understood the subtleties of the double-cross, the characters are forced to explain it again, and then Nina Maria is ordered to leave the country.
At the border, Don Diego stops her carriage to return the locket. Just when some kind of dramatic conclusion is called for, a second story begins. We are treated to a Slavko Vorkapich montage showing the oppression of the Spanish by the French. Nina Maria and the Marquis watch Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte (Stanley Price), make a triumphal entrance into Madrid as the new Spanish ruler. Nina Maria regrets that all this was caused by her failure, but the Marquis tells her she will have another chance. She is to drop out of sight for a while.
The montage continues with peasants marching under a cloudless sky, a sea of scythes, hoes, and rakes against the guns of the French. Amidst the billows of gunsmoke, the Union Jack appears. A few bars of “The British Grenadiers” and we see Wellington marching to save the day. Symbolically, his line of troops and the peasant militia move down separate forks of a road to join in one great mass; symbolically, they march, and in a double image we see great rocks, carved with the names of Spanish victories, explode.
In a brief camp sequence, the Marquis advises Wellington (Matthew Boulton) that they cannot continue until they hear from a very special spy who is now behind the French lines. The military drums dissolve into a thumping dance rhythm. A group of wild Spanish gypsy girls is entertaining the troops around a campfire. One of them is Nina Maria. The delightful raw tones of the gypsy players evolve into a full orchestration of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Capriccio Espagñole.” In a weakly choreographed number, Miss MacDonald whirls before the flames. The passing Colonel De Rougemont spots her.
Another gorgeous frock.
On the Colonel’s orders, Nina Maria is brought to headquarters where she is “caught” with a map of the French lines. The intelligence officer on duty is, of course, Captain André, the former Diego. He translates the coded message, and Nina Maria is imprisoned to await execution. The map shows the positions of the French troops and asks for verification. In the same code, Captain André writes on the map that all is correct except that the French center is weak. The Colonel orders half of each flank to the center, then releases one of Nina Maria’s pigeons with the message attached to its leg. From the headquarters window, André watches the bird rise, circle, and fly off.
From her prison window, Nina Maria also watches the bird, but with strange exultation. André visits her cell, and, as the Spanish troops close in, Nina Maria again explains. Her job was to get caught with the message. The Spanish know that any message they receive will have been sent by the French. They will attack whichever area is designated as the strongest, knowing it will be the weakest. André runs off to be with his men, but is waylaid by some unconvincing smoke pot bombs. Nina Maria sees him fall. In a somewhat incongruous reprise of their love song, she thrusts her arms through the bars toward him, singing “Giannina Mia” with tears streaming down her face.
The rumble of explosions fades before the triumphal chorus of victory, and in another montage we see the French flag fall into the dust. The symbolic peasant of Spain rises up and casts off his shackles, backlit by a glorious sunrise. America was very concerned with the Spanish Civil War in 1937, and this was supposed to be stirring stuff, but it is hard to believe that much of the audience found it more than a cliché.
The Marquis enters Nina Maria’s cell as the battle concludes. The cheers outside are for her, he says. She goes immediately to the open air hospitals, seeking her Don Diego. She finds him, bandaged and delirious, and sinks down beside him. Dissolve to the lovers, healthy and together in a mule-drawn wagon as they sing the “Donkey Serenade” and a few bars of “Giannina Mia. |
