Flying Down to Rio

Aviator and band leader Roger Bond is forever getting his group fired for flirting with the lady guests. When he falls for Brazilian beauty Belinha de Rezende it appears to be for real, even though she is already engaged., The top-billed stars in the extravagant RKO musical Flying Down to Rio are Dolores Del Rio and Gene Raymond. Forget all that: this is the movie that first teamed Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. We’re supposed to care about the romantic triangle between aviator/bandleader Raymond, Brazilian heiress Del Rio and her wealthy fiance Raul Roulien, but the moment Fred and Ginger dance to a minute’s worth of “The Carioca”, the film is theirs forever. Other musical highlights include Rogers’ opening piece “Music Makes Me” and tenor Roulien’s lush rendition of “Orchids in the Moonlight”. Then there’s the title number. The plot has it that Del Rio’ uncle has been prohibited from having a floor show at his lavish hotel because of a Rio city ordinance. Astaire and Raymond save the day by staging the climactic “Flying Down to Rio” number thousands of feet in the air, with hundreds of chorus girls shimmying and swaying while strapped to the wings of a fleet of airplanes. It is one of the most outrageously brilliant numbers in movie musical history, and one that never fails to incite a big round of applause from the audience–even audiences of the 1990s. Together with King Kong, Flying Down to Rio saved the fledgling RKO Radio studios from bankruptcy in 1933. The film was a smash everywhere it played, encouraging the studio to concoct future teamings of those two stalwart supporting players Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers., Aviator and band leader Roger is forever getting his group fired for flirting with the ladies. Roger falls for Brazilian beauty Belinha, but there’s one problem: she is already engaged., Romantic musical about a bandleader and pilot who flies a girl to Rio to see her ailing father, but is annoyed to find when he gets there that he has competition for her affections. This was the first screen pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Dance numbers include the famous Carioca., Classic musical which brought Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire together on screen for the first time. Dolores del Rio and Gene Raymond are the stars of a successful Rio-bound dance troupe., A Brazilian woman is wooed by an American bandleader, even though she is engaged to marry his best friend.