![]() In one of ''Mambo King`s'' funnier moments, he has them come on the ''Lucy'' show and take part in a comedy sketch about two visiting Cubans who can`t speak English. In the movie, the Desi character, by then a famous band leader as well as TV star and a folk hero to the Cuban-American community, befriends the two brothers and visits them in their still shabby home. He could only find people who knew Rick (the comic husband Arnaz, Sr., played on `I Love Lucy`). But a year and a half passed and Glimcher wrote me a long letter. My mother (Lucille Ball) had just passed away. Then he came back and asked if I wanted to play dad. ''Arne Glimcher first came to me and asked for permission to portray dad in his movie. ''I didn`t want to do it at first,'' he said. Perhaps the most difficult challenge facing any of the players was that so well met by Arnaz, Jr., playing his own father. I was able to use all those experiences.''ĭetmers, who lives in Paris and makes her American debut with this film, was ''discovered'' by Glimcher, chosen for the delicately difficult role of Dolores Fuentes.Ī Dutch-born star of numerous French and Italian films, Detmers created much of Dolores` character herself-an educated, ahead-of-her-times woman living in the unliberated `50s but trapped as the love interest of both old-school Cuban men. From the beginning of that grueling schedule, when I was suffering with my trumpet, with the English, with a foreign country, I kept telling myself that Nestor, too, is a man who knows suffering. until 7 p.m., I took English classes at Berlitz, and from 7 p.m. to 9 a.m., I worked out at the gym,'' he said. He couldn`t speak a word when he signed for the film. In thrall to his brother, he rebels, but his violence is misdirected.Īs the sensitive Nestor, Spain`s Banderas had to master the trumpet and the English language. He is the real royalty of the ''Kings,'' but at heart wants none of it. A talented trumpet player and truly inspired composer, he produces the music that Cesar so flamboyantly markets. Young, quiet-spoken Nestor is a more introverted type. But, like Icarus, he finally becomes mortal and is forced to realize what is actually attainable in his lifetime.'' ![]() ''Although Cesar lives in a world of perpetual adolescence,'' Assante said, ''he is a man with the gift to take what little he has and make it the stuff that dreams are made of. Nestor tries to show him that`s not what happiness is.'' A characteristic type, obsessed with himself and success. ''He`s obsessed with himself,'' said Arnaz, ''a proud, ego-driven, self-centered man. The day is not long in coming, but there are pitfalls along that road.Ĭesar, 11 years older than the gifted Nestor, is the driving force of the two, a musician and promoter of limitless ambition and cocky, fearless arrogance.Īs portrayed by Assante, he is every woman`s dream-and also dread-of the machismo male. ''Mambo Kings'' takes the brothers to New York, where they find jobs as butchers in a meat processing plant and yearn for the day when they may take their place alongside such Cuban musical superstars as Puente and Arnaz in big-name clubs and ballrooms like the Palladium. In the 1950s, as in the later exodus from Fidel Castro`s Cuba, the principal refuges for exiles from the island were Miami and New York. Two musical brothers, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, flee the Cuba of dictator Fulgencio Batista, not for political reasons but to escape violent death at the hands of a gangster nightclub owner who has expropriated the love of Nestor`s life, the beautiful Maria of the bolero, as his wife. The film focuses on the years from 1952 to 1955. ''It tells us that the happiness we seek lies in ourselves.''
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