The New Pictures, Feb. 19, 1945

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The Three Caballeros (Disney-RKO-Radio) is that rare event, a Disney failure. Like Saludos Amigos ('TIME, Jan. 25> 1943)> this full-length film was made in the interests of hemispheric good will. The good will is entrusted chiefly to Donald Duck, who expresses it in terms of an alarmingly incongruous case of hot pants. Thanks to an ingenious but seldom very rewarding blend of drawings and regular color-movies with living actors, Donald whizzes from one Latin American beauty to the next like a berserk bumblebee. Since he remains at base a combination of loud little boy and loud little duck, his erotomaniacal regard for these full-blown young ladies is of strictly pathological interest.

Donald is flanked on his tour of the Good-Neighborhood by debonair Joe

Carioca and by Panchito, a new bird representing Mexico, so irresolutely developed as a character that he remains in the memory chiefly as a yell with red hair. As a curtain raiser (it would make a good short by itself) there is also a rather cute penguin who travels north to an equatorial island and acquires a suntan. The movie as a whole presents the unhappy spectacle of a brilliant artist screaming his lungs out in an effort to make up for the fact that he has, for the moment, nothing to say.

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