Rio

“The world is all wrong. There is no music. There is no laughter.” Such dark sentiment, unusual for a 1930’s film, colors the world of John Brahm’s Rio and its anti-heroic protagonist Paul Reynard (Basil Rathbone), a powerful financier whose criminal shenanigans land him in a penal colony off the South American coast. Robert Cummings plays Bill Gregory, a handsome dam engineer who assiduously courts the affections of Reynard’s wife Irene (Sigrid Gurie) while explaining how her husband’s financial schemes destroyed so many lives. Victor McLaglen plays Dirk, Reynard’s almost certainly homosexual best friend — and henchman — whose steadfast devotion to Reynard and his rotting heart comes to a poetic end. Brahm’s direction here reveals the dimension and imagination that would evolve in his later noirs: many scenes are brilliantly choreographed, especially Reynard’s celebration and arrest at the night club and his ruthless prison escape through swampland.