Road to Rio is a musical (kinda) comedy, one of the "Road" series, starring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, Gale Sondergaard, George Meeker, and cameos from the Wiere Brothers and the Andrews Sisters.
As with Road to Bali, the plot is pretty inconsequential, although I think it's a little tighter. Scat Sweeny (Crosby) and Hot Lips Barton (Hope) are, again, entertainers who are on the run from the families of women they've become involved with, and wind up on a ship to Rio. While there, they meet Lucia Maria de Andrade (Lamour) as she attempts to throw herself overboard.
(Side note: This makes a strange number of movies in which that's the meet-cute: the hero(es) preventing the heroine from leaping to her death. This, Titanic, Wolverine, what the shit?)
Anyway, it turns out Lucia is being hypnotized by her guardian, Catherine Vail (Sondergaard), which I have to admit is a cool-sounding villain name. She's going to marry Lucia off to Sherman (Meeker), all in service to obtaining "the papers", which are such a MacGuffin that there's literally not even an attempt to explain what they mean (Crosby reads them and then informs the audience that the world will never know).
I can say much the same about Rio as I said about Bali: the gags are funny, the dialog is snappy, the music is nice (I especially like the Andrews Sisters and their song with Crosby), and the chemistry between the three leads is undeniable. The final gag, in which Lucia chooses Barton instead of Sweeny, but it turns out that's because he's hypnotizing her, is a little cringeworthy, but for a movie like this to only have one cringey moment of note is pretty good.
My Grade: B-
Rewatch Value: Medium
Next up: The Adventures of Robin Hood
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