Allusion, Intertext, and Ethnic Flattening in Groucho Marx and Carmen Miranda’s Copacabana”

This article recommends that academic film criticism reorient itself towards scholarly resuscitation of “obscure” popular film texts and takes the independent musical comedy Copacabana (1947), starring Groucho Marx and Carmen Miranda, as an exemplary beneficiary. The film is compared with other Carmen Miranda vehicles (such as those made for Twentieth Century Fox) in order to establish its self-distancing, so to speak, from prevailing notions of musical spectacle in favor of a noteworthy referential density predicated on humorous awareness of the tension between stage and film. Two distinct economies of reference, allusion and intertextuality, are detected in appreciating how Marx and Miranda represent themselves, their iconographies, and their performative histories in the film, with key emphasis on duality and what I call the ethnic flattening of Miranda’s performative persona between the Brazilian phase of her career and the American phase. Copacabana’s prescient mode of irony pursues theatrical history and reference, including histories of cultural appropriation, to a degree that requires a kind of formal/cinematic awkwardness, itself a source of humor.