And they don't come any odder or more obscure than this one.......the kind of movie that makes you scratch your head in wonderment about its genesis.......as in, "Who the hell thought this movie was a good idea? Who talked MGM into making it? What kind of audience was it designed for....if any?"
One wild guess: a family film...maybe? Sort of? The story centers on five Mexican street kids scrambling for a buck or two in Tijuana, with an age range of 6 to 14 years old......
The kids pin their dreams of falling into big money by convincing American tourists to place horse race bets on their behalf....... with coins they pilfer from a church collection box......
Lo and behold.......(pardon us, we've been waiting years to write 'lo and behold' in one of these posts).....the kids bet on a winner, to the tune of 80,000 smackeroos.........
A new dilemma now faces our band of ragamuffins........they now need an adult to cash in the ticket for them
You'd think this movie wants to thrum your heartstrings, like some kind of rogue Disney film......but it wanders off into tangents that would give Uncle Walt a heart attack......
......by that, we mean a scene where the 14 year old urchin wants to put the moves on the voluptuous 20-something sister of one of the younger kids.....and she in turn encourages him cause she wants to put the moves on that precious ticket.....
A bittersweet fable might be what the filmmakers were going for here.......but that's only a guess. It does benefit from a fine collection of child actors ( including the all-American tyke Roger Mobley with his hair latino-darkened) and offers a role to the ultra-sexy but criminally little seen Barbara Luna as Mobley's older sister..
The kids hard-knock life on the Tijuana streets is realistically depicted with equal measures of humor and grit......and the pace never dawdles.......but we couldn't help wishing we could have seen the MGM studio production meeting that gave this film a greenlight.......
(A fellow movie buff pal informed us that the studio used 'Dime With A Halo' to function as the bottom half of any double bill that featured an MGM romantic comedy....)
Not quite the heartwarmer it threatens to become, but a worthy watch for anyone who savors the oddities of the 60's.......2 stars (**)
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