Pepe (1960)

Academy Awards, USA 1961

Nominated Oscar	Best Cinematography, Color Joseph MacDonald
	Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color Ted Haworth William Kiernan
	Best Costume Design, Color Edith Head
	Best Sound Charles Rice (Columbia SSD)
	Best Film Editing Viola Lawrence Al Clark
	Best Music, Original Song André Previn (music) Dory Previn (lyrics) (as Dory Langdon) For the song "Faraway Part of Town"
	Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture Johnny Green

Columbia Pictures
Directed by George Sidney
My rating: 2 stars out of 4
IMDb
(Netflix)

Poor Mexican stable boy Cantinflas has his favorite horse sold to a famous Hollywood director. He follows them there with the hopes of reclaiming him, only to become involved in the director's personal and professional life. He falls in love with angry Shirley Jones, who works in a beatnik bar and hopes to become a movie star. They hang out in the director's dilapidated mansion while he mostly gets drunk. Needing cash for his next movie, they go to Las Vegas where Cantinflas wins it gambling. They travel back to Mexico to make it, straightening out their love life in the process. Overlong, to be sure, but also strangely entertaining, brimming with cameos and glimpses of the Columbia studio. Jones' moody beatnik bar and dance scene actually predates West Side Story by a year.