PintandooSete

Catito, a clown, manages to flee a forced marriage, by hiding inside Dr. Cláudio's car trunk. In Rio de Janeiro, his host forces him to impersonate the famous painter Picanssô, to impress his girlfriend Sílvia's friends. She's a socialite whose main interest is her own social projection. (from IMDB)This is a film from the Brazilian"chanchada" movement that was a big commercial success in the country during the 50s and early 60s. This is an excerpt from an article on the Atlântida film company, the one that produced"Barnabé" and most successful films from this period:The Atlântida studios, founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1941, enjoyed unprecedented commercial success until the early 1960s thanks to their"chanchadas". The term"chanchada" was initially used in a pejorative sense to refer to the film musicals of the 1930s and early 1940s which promoted carnival songs and took their lead from Hollywood, yet the term soon became synonymous with the light musical comedies produced by Atlântida. By the 1950s,"chanchadas" were no longer necessarily musicals, but they remained many carnivalesque features, particularly the inversion of established hierarchies in their story lines, and, as the Brazilian film industry gained in confidence, these irreverent comedies turned their attention to parodic reworkings of Hollywood's generic models.