YOLANDA AND THE THIEF

 "YOLANDA AND THE THIEF" --- (1945) --- 

FUN FACTS & TRIVIA:

• This film's visual style, with musical numbers staged like dream sequences featuring painted backdrops rather than full-fledged sets, low-key lighting and background dancers wearing brightly colored costumes as they cavort around the film's two stars, was thought to be a major factor in its failure to draw an audience. Yet a similar style was used five years later in An American in Paris (1951), and that film was not only one of M-G-M's biggest hits, but was also one of the few movie musicals to win an Oscar for Best Picture.
• The original magazine short story by Ludwig Bemelmans and Jacques Théry is written in the form of a film treatment, leading to speculation that it actually was one to begin with, and that the authors, failing to sell it to a movie studio, presented it as magazine fiction instead. Once it had been published in a magazine, MGM was happy to pay the authors $23,000 ($413,000 in 2024) for the film rights.
• Fred Astaire's first released color film. Ziegfeld Follies (1945) was due to be his first color film, and he had already completed all of his scenes for that movie in 1944, before "Yolanda and the Thief" even went into production. However, due to post-production issues, "Ziegfeld Follies" was not released until July 1946, a full eight months after "Yolanda and the Thief".
• This film was first telecast in Philadelphia Saturday 25 January 1958 on WFIL (Channel 6), At this time, color broadcasting was in its infancy, limited to only a small number of high rated programs, primarily on NBC and NBC affiliated stations, so these film showings were still in B&W. Viewers were not offered the opportunity to see these films in their original Technicolor until several years later.
• This film was Betty Russell's debut.
• One of the authors of the story on which this film was based is Ludwig Bemelmans, best known as the writer and illustrator of one of the most successful series of children's books of all time, the Madeline books, focused on the child charges of a religious orphanage in Paris.
• Both Frank Morgan and Mary Nash appeared in The Human Comedy (1943).
• This film was also Audrey Betz's debut.
• Leon Ames (Mr. Candle} and Lucille Bremer appeared as father and daughter in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944).
• This film was also Jeanne Blackford's debut.