Pepe (1960)

 

Pepe takes almost three hours to tell a somewhat simple story. Pepe (played by the great Cantinflas) is a ranch hand in Mexico whose prized horse is a beautiful white stallion named Don Juan. Everyone wants to purchase Don Juan, but Pepe tricks everyone into backing out of buying him except for Hollywood director Ted Holt (Dan Dailey), who plans to make money off the horse to fund his comeback picture. Pepe, following the advice of Greer Garson, tracks Holt down and looks after Don Juan in Holt’s crumbling Beverly Hills mansion. He also meets and starts to fall in love with Shirley Jones’s Suzie Murphy, whose parents were never appreciated by the movie business despite their years of hard work. She acts as if she hates Hollywood, but of course, she really wants to be a star herself. Pepe convinces her and Holt that she could be a star in a very foggy dream sequence performed to “Faraway Part of Town” by Judy Garland, one of the few stars who doesn’t make a cameo appearance in the film. In truth, one of the most interesting aspects of Pepe (perhaps the only interesting one, to be honest) is the seemingly endless series of cameos by famous performers: Zsa Zsa Gabor, Charles Coburn, Jay North (who played Dennis the Menace on TV), Hedda Hopper, etc. Some stars get a bit more than just a line or two. Bing Crosby autographs Pepe’s tortilla and sings a little of “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way).” Jack Lemmon shows up in his drag costume from Some Like It Hot a year after the earlier movie was released. Maurice Chevalier gets a full production number with both Cantinflas and Dailey. Kim Novak even helps him to pick out an engagement ring. A sequence set at the Sands Hotel, where Pepe wins enough through gambling to get financing for Holt’s film, allows us to see most of the members of the Rat Pack: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford. Even Jimmy Durante shows up in the Las Vegas portion of the film. There’s also a bizarre sequence involving Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, who were married at the time, thinking that Pepe is a Mexican movie official. That scene does allow Cantinflas to demonstrate his talent for physical comedy, though, as he drunkenly dances first with Leigh and then with Curtis and even with Dailey. Edward G. Robinson is often listed as making a cameo appearance, but even though he’s playing himself, his part is integral to the plot. Cantinflas is a very charming screen presence, and it’s a shame that this film was his American follow-up to Around the World in 80 Days. He had such talent—a bullfight sequence at the start of the film shows just how impressive he can be—but Hollywood didn’t really seem to know what to do with him. For example, Pepe traffics in stereotypes that should have been cringe-inducing even in 1960. When Pepe first shows up at a Hollywood movie studio to see Holt, he’s mistaken for a shoe repairman and then for a parking attendant. He’s also prone to misunderstanding some idioms in English, and some of his explanations, such as how he considers Don Juan his “son,” confuse lots of other characters. Then there’s his penchant for rubbing a bull’s ear on himself for good luck, an odd take on the lucky rabbit’s foot, I suppose. His character is meant to be the innocent in a corrupt world, so it’s not surprising that he doesn’t always understand what’s happening. He wants to believe that everyone is good and that you have to protect the ones that you love. Unfortunately, that kind of thinking cannot last even in a Hollywood movie, especially one where the lovely young white woman should end up with the delightful Mexican man (but doesn’t). Aside from such racist depictions, one of the other weaknesses of the film is how long and strange some of the musical numbers are. Before she starts work on Holt’s movie, Jones’s Suzie works as a waitress and dancer in what can only be described as a beatnik café. Bobby Darin shows up to sing “That’s How It Went, All Right” while Jones and a couple of male dancers perform something akin to what the lyrics say. It seems to go on forever. Likewise, Jones does a huge production number of the title song that involves what seems like hundreds of extras dancing through the streets of a Mexican town. Cantinflas and Debbie Reynolds emerge from a wine bottle to perform a strange dance to “Tequila” as tiny versions of themselves atop Holt’s desk. None of these numbers really advance the plot, but they certainly lengthen the movie unnecessarily. Pepe received no Academy Awards despite tying with The Alamo and Sons and Lovers as the second most nominated film of 1960. Interestingly, some of the performers making cameos were having success in other 1960 films: Greer Garson in Sunrise at Campobello, Janet Leigh in Psycho, Jack Lemmon in The Apartment, Shirley Jones in Elmer Gantry. All of them were Oscar nominated, and Jones won an Academy Award for a much better performance than the one she gives here.

Oscar Nominations: Best Color Cinematography, Best Color Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Color Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Original Song (“Faraway Part of Town”), Best Scoring of a Musical Picture, and Best Sound