KYMM'S 365 DAY MOVIE CHALLENGE #17: Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It (2021, dir Mariem Reiz Perera, USA))
Rita Moreno is, of course, a national treasure.
Every time I’ve ever seen her interviewed she is always so funny and such a raconteur, when I heard that they had made a documentary about her I was like, “Well, I certainly am going to see this!”
It does not disappoint.
However, she is not holding back on the difficulty she had in life. I don’t think it’s ever been easy to be a beautiful woman in Hollywood, particularly if you’re very young and very innocent, because there are people who will take advantage of you and by people, I mean men. Especially powerful men. And it doesn’t improve things if you are a person of color.
Rita Moreno was the first Latinx woman to be a star, after Rita Hayworth, who, of course, completely hid her Hispanic heritage. And being a person of color, means that you play all the people of color. She has a massive number of films on her résumé that are extremely terrible, in which she plays she plays random dusky maidens with unidentifiable accents who generally die after falling in love with a white man.She was thrilled to play the small part of Zelda in Singing in the Rain, because she got to play a character and not a stereotype, Zelda was just Zelda, she wasn’t foreign Zelda, she was a real character. But besides that, until West Side Story, there wasn’t a lot. The King and I is a classic, but Tuptim is not particularly interesting or nuanced character, she’s kind of just there to be tragic and yearning, and of course Rita ain’t Siamese/Thai.
In West Side Story, of course she had an accent, but it was a Puerto Rican accent, and she also had a real character in a great movie. She was also either the lone or one of the very few actual Puerto Ricans involved in the film, as George Shakiris was Greek and Natalie Wood was Russian, but that’s as may be. She won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, of course, and subsequently was only offered gang members girlfriends, and thus didn’t make any movies for a while! In fact, the latter half of her career is just astonishing, particularly compared to the beginning. The story of her marriage is very interesting, and I won’t give that away. There’s a very cute story about their first date, and then later Rita tells it like it really was. The woman is 89 years old, 90 at the end of this year, and it doesn’t look like she’s slowing down a bit.
This film is very well done, with a lot of great talking heads, (I certainly hope that Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s horrific hair situation was for a role and not because that’s what he wants to look like in his every day life). The director, Mariem Pérez Riera adds paper doll animation that is interesting, but I think there should’ve either been more or less of it, because it doesn’t seem as effective as well as it might.
I saw it at the AMC, which surprised me that they are releasing it beyond the art house cinemas. No shade on the Laemmle, I love that chain, I’m just glad that the distributor is opening it wider than that. I wouldn’t count on it being in the theatres for much longer. It was made by PBS American Masters and will be on television after its theatrical run. It is is definitely worth seeking out.
Kymm Zuckert is an actor/writer/native Angelino. When Kymm was a child, her parents would take her to see anything, which means that sometimes she will see a film today and say, “I saw that when I was eight, I don’t remember any of that inappropriate sex stuff!” Check out her entire 365 day blog @ https://365filmsin365days.movie.blog
