Customer Reviews

Pepe [VHS]

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I remember seeing this movie when I was growing up. I've only been able to find this film on VHS only in Spanish. I would like to beable to find one in English. If anyone can help me I would appreciate it.

I admit that this probably isn't a great movie, but I've many great memories of vewing the movie Pepe several times at the theater. The music was fun and there were many Cameos of some wonderful entertainers who are no longer with us. I would certainly enjoy reliving some memories with Pepe on DVD.

Recently saw this movie on cable encore. wonderful music, dancing and comedy. Cantiflas the sidekick in Around the World, probably Shirley Jones first, Dan Daley always good. The movie is full of cameos by the "Rat Pack" Sinatra et al. 1961 issue but they don't make them like this anymore, unfotunately. Almost 2 hrs of sheer deligful entertainment. .

Pepe, Is one of my all time favorite movies. Growing up I would watch him with my mother who is 87 years old. It made me cry and laugh at the same time. They just don't make movie like that anymore.

Pepe is a flimsy story meant to showcase a bunch of Columbia's stars...and it succeeds. Cameos abound and it's fun to "count the stars" as they pass through the story line - especially Greer Garson playing herself, as Mrs. Buddy Fogelson! Most of these stars are gone now, and it's a pleasure seeing them in their heyday. Cantinflas is his usual original self, and the music is fun too! The downside is that the video looks as if it has been copied too many times. Come on, Columbia/Sony, re-release it in its original form. On DVD if possible!

Pepe is a flimsy story meant to showcase a bunch of Columbia's stars...and it succeeds. Cameos abound and it's fun to "count the stars" as they pass through the story line - especially Greer Garson playing herself, as Mrs. Buddy Fogelson! Most of these stars are gone now, and it's a pleasure seeing them in their heyday. Cantinflas is his usual original self, and the music is fun too!

I consider that "Pepe" is a very good film. I have seen it at least 4 times, but it was long time ago. I would like to have it in DVD version.

The last time I watched Pepe I was very young. This movie was entertaining, funny, and in good taste. I think most everyone will enjoy this movie.

George Sidney, one of Hollywood's most underrated directors, never made an awful film, but this one comes close, mostly due to its insufferably cloying use of Cantinflas--one of Mexico's smartest, wittiest movie stars ever--but here you'd think he was a moron, a smiling bobblehead of Mexican folk wisdom and simplicity.

Indeed Cantinflas, as "Pepe," whom you might call the original "horse whisperer," is incredibly good in the movie, which makes it a drag to have to give it a big two thumbs down for political reasons. He's not playing a Stepin Fetchit EXACTLY, and in fact he's always seen as wiser than the silly norteamericanos who try to patronize him, but the whole thing about he loves the horse so much he calls him "my son" (not just once but approximately forty or forty-five times) leaves you grating your teeth.

And also it seems to emasculate Cantinflas who was, like Elvis, super sexy. Here the movie pokes fun of the way his pants slide low, low, low down his hips. Au contraire, such ease with undress is one reason why Cantinflas is sex appeal on two legs! And yet through the whole movie you don't even know if he's in love with Shirley Jones or is he just playing Sancho Panza hoping to get his master, the failed Hollywood director Ted Holt (Dan Dailey), into bed with la Jones--here playing a beat bohemian--and doing it rather well too -- of course she's always good no matter what she does, and George Sidney--who directed many glamor girls into performances of real depth and soul and originality, from Kim Novak to Ann-Margret--gives Shirley Jones what she never had elsewhere, a contemporary pizzazz, like street chic.

When she (or her double) dances in the underground nightclub with Michael Mickey Callan, my pulses were on fire!

But basically the movie is a fantastic treasure trove of forgotten performances and curiosities; let me cite only the amazing dance trio of Dailey, Cantinflas, and Maurice Chevalier in a reprise of "Mimi" in a luxurious Mexican nightclub, and at the other end of the spectrum a buzarre, Dali Influenced number in which Pepe and Debbie Reynolds (as herself), dressed in identical "Mexican" costumes, tumble out of the mouth of a giant bottle of tequila and perform a drunken, Jack Cole style tumble dance to, yes, "Tequila." PEPE was Eugene Loring's last film, and the dance director/choreographer, who had done everything from FUNNY FACE to YOLANDA AND THE THIEF in the past, here retires with some of his most inventive and convincing dances--in a movie nobody even knows about. The title number, with Shirley Jones in a dirndl, belting out the song while leading a donkey and three hundred Mexican extras, and Pepe, down a steep traffic filled hill on the narrowest street in the world, has got to be seen to be believed, and you'll still be scratching your head--why? How? What? Where? When?

Let's bring back PEPE in a big way. If every man, woman and child in the US and Mexico would see it, I'm convinced that -- well, wait a second-- there might be race riots at the border-- and yet it is an unbelievable compendium of fun. With Bing Crosby, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon (in character in his role in SOME LIKE IT HOT), Ann B. Davis, Greer Garson, Bobby Darin, and Edward G. Robinson.

Some friends and I saw this film back in the early 1960s, when it was first released, and we really enjoyed it. Besides providing another chance to see the wonderful comic actor Cantinflas in an English language film, there were many wonderful cameos by some of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Judy Garland didn't appear onscreen but she recorded a song for the film; the following year she finally appeared in her first film in seven years: "Judgement at Nuremburg." I remember that we enjoyed see Shirley Jones in the film; she was always a pretty and very sweet lady, who appeared in several major musical films and who later had quite a following when she starred on the television series "The Partridge Family."

One can only hope that the film will be available again on DVD. There was apparently a limited release of the film. Undoubtedly, the critics weren't kind to the film, which had a rather lightweight story, and it didn't do terribly well at the box office. Nevertheless, it would likely be wonderful to see again, providing yet another "time capsule" of Hollywood's golden age.