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charlatan, Johnny Riggs. Freed and MGM’s front office were also banking on Yolanda to imitate the success of You Were Never Lovelier , the 1942 Columbia triumph that had paired Astaire with Rita Hayworth and that featured a somewhat similar storyline.
    As with virtually every musical announced by MGM, Judy Garland was at one time slated to play Yolanda Aquaviva, the most beloved resident of the mythical South American country of Patria—“the land of milk and money.” Despite her interest in appearing in Yolanda , Garland would ultimately be assigned to The Harvey Girls , a pet project of her mentor-arranger Roger Edens. In March 1944, the studio next announced that Lucille Ball, fresh from her triumph in Metro’s Best Foot Forward , would play the wide-eyed heiress. Ultimately, the role was given to Freed’s comely protégé, Lucille Bremer. After receiving positive notices as a result of her memorable pairing with Fred Astaire in Ziegfeld Follies , Bremer was being groomed for Garland-sized superstardom. For Yolanda and the Thief , Bremer’s name would be
billed after Astaire’s but above the title, a signal to audiences that there was a new star in Metro’s firmament.
    Many on the lot were surprised that Bremer rose through the ranks as swiftly as she did. “She came out of nowhere,” says former contract dancer Judi Blacque. “We certainly never thought that she would become a major star. Don’t misunderstand me. She was very nice. Very attractive. And she could dance. But when you look at what was available in Hollywood at that time, it was incredible that she got as far as she did.” 1
    After the unqualified success of Meet Me in St. Louis , Freed felt that he could confidently turn to screenwriter Irving Brecher to translate the Thery-Bemelmans prose into a screenplay that retained the original story’s childlike innocence while managing to keep war-weary audiences awake. “The story was nothing,” Brecher admitted decades later. “I didn’t like it. But Freed wanted to make it . . . and to star Lucille Bremer, who had been in Meet Me in St. Louis , and, if she was not having an affair with Arthur Freed, was at least being coveted by Freed. In any case, I didn’t want to work on Yolanda . Nothing was happening with it, and I didn’t think there was a picture in it that I could do that would be worth anything.” 2
    Whereas Brecher’s screenplay for Meet Me in St. Louis had contained universal situations and humor that anyone with a slightly off-center family could relate to, Yolanda occupied more rarefied territory. Minnelli would later boast that Yolanda contained “the first surrealist ballet ever used in pictures.” Bold and Dali-esque in design, Astaire’s “Dream Ballet” was certainly striking, but including a surrealistic ballet in an already fanciful musical was not unlike piling a hot fudge sundae on top of a banana split. Everything in Yolanda’s world—from her baroque bathtub to her singing servants—was the stuff of absurdist, off-the-wall fantasy. As Noel Langley, one of the screenwriters of The Wizard of Oz , once observed: “You cannot put fantastic people in strange places in front of an audience unless they have seen them as human beings first.” 3
    There is nothing earthbound about Yolanda , which is both part of its charm and part of its problem. A prime example of Minnelli at his most uninhibited and self-indulgent, the movie showed what could happen when Vincente sacrificed story to style. As would occur later with The Pirate , the stylistic excesses of Yolanda would delight Minnelli fans but confound mainstream audiences expecting a more conventional musical-comedy outing.
    Bremer, while not untalented, was miscast as the pious, convent-bred Yolanda—though, to be fair, even Judy Garland’s trademark sincerity would have been taxed with lines such as, “I’m not the only one who’s happy tonight. . . . The man in the moon is smiling.” It also doesn’t help