- TCM schedule – Sept. 5: Turner Classic Movies’ daytime film series “Musicals with Xavier Cugat” consists of seven MGM titles featuring the Spanish-Cuban bandleader seen in a total of nine MGM releases of the 1940s – most of them Technicolor musicals – including Bathing Beauty, A Date with Judy, and Neptune’s Daughter.
- This Xavier Cugat article includes a brief overview of two of his TCM movies: A Date with Judy and Bathing Beauty.
TCM schedule – Sept. 5 (daytime): 7 Xavier Cugat movies featuring the Spanish-Cuban bandleader who helped to popularize ‘Latin’ music in the U.S. in the 1940s
Turner Classic Movies’ daytime theme on Thursday, Sept. 5, is “Musicals with Xavier Cugat,” consisting of seven Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer releases featuring the Spanish-born, Cuban-raised bandleader (1900–1990) credited with popularizing “Latin” music in the United States during the World War II years. (See TCM’s Xavier Cugat movie schedule further below. Most titles will remain available for a while on the Watch TCM app.)
By “Latin,” we don’t mean Ancient Roman music. Instead, the word is being loosely (and however inaccurately) used to encompass everything Spanish-ish south of the Rio Grande and in Spain proper.
That would include Cugat’s place of birth: Catalonia, where Catalan – not Spanish – is the centuries-old native language and culture. (Cugat’s fellow MGM Spaniard, José Iturbi, came from the province to the south, Valencia, where Catalan’s sister-language/dialect Valencian is spoken.)
Cugat’s own name, in fact, doesn’t sound all that Spanish: Francisco de Asís Javier Cugat Mingall de Bru y Deulofeu.
But who cares about such details when narrow-minded oversimplifications are so much more convenient?
So let’s move on.
Sr. Cugat goes to Hollywood
After spending his childhood and early adolescence in Cuba, Xavier Cugat moved to the United States in 1915, prior to that country’s entry into World War I. By the 1920s, he had become a bandleader, playing at Los Angeles’ trendy Coconut Grove, where he is supposed to have befriended tango aficionado Charles Chaplin. Another Cugat gig was working as a cartoonist at the Los Angeles Times.
In the early 1940s, Cugat began appearing as himself in several Hollywood musicals at various studios – e.g., Columbia’s You Were Never Lovelier (1942), United Artists’ Stage Door Canteen – until MGM grabbed him for itself in 1944.
That year he was seen in his first two of eight musicals (plus one drama) at the studio: Richard Thorpe’s Two Girls and a Sailor, starring Van Johnson, June Allyson, and Gloria DeHaven, and George Sidney’s Bathing Beauty, starring Red Skelton and Esther Williams.
Two Girls and a Sailor and Robert Z. Leonard’s 1945 all-star drama Week-End at the Waldorf (where Cugat used to play in real life) were his only black-and-white MGM titles.
Color Cugat
TCM, however, isn’t interested in monochrome Xavier Cugat. That’s fine for one day, except that several prints of the movies listed further below look appallingly faded and video-like.
As for the quality of the movies themselves, the best of the bunch is possibly Richard Thorpe’s 1948 Santa Barbara-set musical family comedy A Date with Judy, based on Jerome Lawrence and Aleen Leslie’s radio series (1941–1950) and featuring Jane Powell, Elizabeth Taylor, Carmen Miranda, and, alas, Wallace Beery.
Luckily, the narrative has its focus on Powell and assorted teen jealousies, competitions, and, in Deanna Durbin style, fears that daddy is having an affair with a rumba dancer. Xavier Cugat, for his part, stretches his acting muscles by playing one more orchestra-conducting version of himself.
A couple of A Date with Judy pluses: Great Technicolor (Robert Surtees) and Jimmy McHugh and Harold Adamson’s song “It’s a Most Wonderful Day,” initially sung by Powell and later on by the whole cast.
A television adaptation – or rather, two – of A Date with Judy followed from 1951–1953. The daytime version featured Patricia Crowley as Judy; the primetime version featured Mary Lynn Beller. Ann Gillis was Judy on the radio.
Bathing Beauty (1944)
It remains puzzling how a by-the-book color musical comedy like Bathing Beauty became a sizable box office hit, as it’s no different from dozens of other such movies the Hollywood studios were cranking out throughout 1940s. Well, maybe minus the swimming-pool bits.
Immediately below is Xavier Cugat’s TCM schedule.
Xavier Cugat movies: TCM schedule (EDT) – Aug. 5
6:00 AM Holiday in Mexico (1946)
Director: George Sidney.
Cast: Walter Pidgeon, Jane Powell, Ilona Massey, José Iturbi, Xavier Cugat, Hugo Haas, William ‘Bill’ Phillips.
127m8:15 AM This Time for Keeps (1947)
Director: Richard Thorpe.
Cast: Esther Williams, Jimmy Durante, Lauritz Melchior, Johnnie Johnston, Xavier Cugat, Dame May Whitty.
105m10:15 AM On an Island with You (1948)
Director: Richard Thorpe.
Cast: Esther Williams, Peter Lawford, Ricardo Montalban, Jimmy Durante, Cyd Charisse, Xavier Cugat, Leon Ames.
107m12:15 PM Luxury Liner (1948)
Director: Richard Whorf.
Cast: George Brent, Jane Powell, Lauritz Melchior, Frances Gifford, Xavier Cugat, Richard Derr, John Ridgely, Connie Gilchrist.
91m2:15 PM A Date with Judy (1948)
Director: Richard Thorpe.
Cast: Wallace Beery, Jane Powell, Elizabeth Taylor, Carmen Miranda, Xavier Cugat, Robert Stack, Scotty Beckett, Selena Royle, Leon Ames.
113m4:15 PM Neptune’s Daughter (1949)
Director: Edward Buzzell.
Cast: Esther Williams, Red Skelton, Ricardo Montalban, Betty Garrett, Keenan Wynn, Xavier Cugat, Ted de Corsia, Mike Mazurki, Mel Blanc.
93m6:00 PM Bathing Beauty (1944)
Director: George Sidney.
Cast: Red Skelton, Esther Williams, Basil Rathbone, Bill Goodwin, Jean Porter, Nana Bryant, Carlos Ramírez, Ethel Smith, Xavier Cugat, Lina Romay, Harry James, Helen Forrest, Donald Meek, Ann Codee, Margaret Dumont, Janis Paige.
101m
notes
Xavier Cugat movie schedule via the TCM website
“Xavier Cugat Movies: MGM’s Favorite Bandleader of the 1940s” last modified in October 2024.