Eddie (Eddie Cantor), recently expelled from college, is mistaken for the gangster getaway driver in a heist. He flees to Mexico, pursued relentlessly by a detective. There he masquerades as a Matador and performs in bullfights.[6][7]
A high-production feature, The Kid From Spain was provided a million-dollar budget by producer Samuel Goldwyn and engaged some of the finest artistic and technical talent available in Hollywood during the early 1930s. Eddie Cantor was ranked among the top box office stars in the US in 1933: in overseas popularity he out-performed Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.[9][10] Choreographer was provided by Busby Berkeley, and cameraman Gregg Toland, who would film Citizen Kane (1941) was cinematographer.
Goldwyn, a notoriously “autocratic” producer, attempted to suppress any revisions to the story or script, treating director McCarey “brusquely” during filming.[11] Cantor, in his 1957 autobiography Take My Life, recalled how he and McCarey circumvented Goldwyn: “One afternoon we got to a scene that didn’t play funny.” Feigning illness, Cantor left the studio and absconded for the weekend to McCarey’s beach house in Santa Barbara. There he and the director overhauled the scene. Cantor continues: “Monday we shot one of the best scenes of the picture. Goldwyn, seeing the rushes, was amused and baffled. He couldn’t figure out where the scene had come from.”[12]
The publicity for The Kid from Spain was provided in part by Eddie Cantor, who plugged the upcoming film on The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour, as well as on his vaudeville tour in late 1932 that complimented the release of the film in November.[13]
The film also enjoyed the serendipitous release of author Ernest Hemingway’s best seller Death in the Afternoon (1932), a tribute to bullfighting traditions in Spain. The famous Brooklyn-born matador Sidney Franklin is high-lighted in Hemingway’s book, and makes his appearance in The Kid from Spain, in which he demonstrates his talents as a bullfighter. These scenes were filmed at a ring specially built at United Artists studios and attended by screen stars Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and Mary Pickford. [14]
The Kid from Spain enjoyed widespread approval among critics, as well as box office success.[15] Critic Thorton Delehanty in The New York Post wrote “Eddie Cantor contributes some excruciatingly funny moments” and The Hollywood Reporter declared that “Leo McCarey’s directions should land this fellow right on his feet in front of the ranks of the present-day hit directors.”[16]
The Kid From Spain was profitable in general release even as the US was descending into the Great Depression.[17] Criticism arose when producer Sam Goldwyn introduced the film in “road shows” at select cities for a quick initial profit. At a time when the average admission price to a movie house was less than 25 cents, tickets to these advance screenings were two dollars [$2]. Film historian Wes D. Gehring notes that “neither McCarey nor Cantor was pleased with this less than egalitarian pricing.”[18] Variety magazine, in response, published a review of the film that included the following remark from Eddie Cantor regarding the $2 tickets: “A guy making a small salary must give up 10% of his [weekly] income to see me in a picture. That’s too tough nowadays.”[19]
Film critic Wes D. Gehring, describing The Kid From Spain as “a challenging and crazy comedy” for director Leo McCarey, comments on vaudevillian Eddie Cantor’s burlesque-influenced contribution to the film:
Even today, with those expressive rolling eyes or his signature comic song shtick of skipping gait and clapping hands, the Cantor energy level still makes Spain a very entertaining picture.[20]
Gehring adds that The Kid From Spain is “overdue for rediscovery.”[21]
^Holston, Kim R. (2013). Movie Roadshows: A History and Filmography of Reserved-Seat Limited Showings, 1911–1973. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc. pp. 74–75. ISBN978-0-7864-6062-5.
Hooper, Gary and Poague, Leland. 1980. Leo McCarey Filmography in The Hollywood Professionals: Wilder and McCarey, Volume 7. The Tanvity Press, A. S. Barnes and Company, Inc., San Diego, California. pp. 295-314 ISBN0498-02181-5
