A Canção de Lisboa: the 1933 talkie that made Lisbon laugh

On the evening of 7 November 1933 a reporter from Cinéfilo, the film magazine of the Lisbon daily O Século, put on a suit and tie like the rest of the audience and took his place at the São Luiz, the theatre and cinema in the Chiado. Everyone had come for A Canção de Lisboa, a comedy with songs made in Lisbon by a company that had not existed a year and a half before.3 sources3 sources

The film opened on a long, slow pan across Lisbon while a woman sang a melancholy tune. It closed at a wedding feast, with Vasco Santana turning to face the audience, glass in hand, to prescribe his cure for everything, “alegroterapia”, or joy therapy: “morrer por morrer, que seja a rir”, if we must die, let it be laughing.2 sources2 sources

The reporter admitted that he had applauded too, and forgot he was there as a journalist. The film press of 1933 greeted the film with the words “Enfim! A Canção!”, “At last! The Canção!”, and called it “the springtime of national production”. Talking pictures had been playing in Lisbon for three and a half years. This was the first made entirely at home.2 sources2 sources

Sound films reached Lisbon’s cinemas in April 1930. Hollywood’s answer to small language markets was to shoot the same story several times in different languages. Paramount filmed Portuguese-language versions of its pictures at its studios in Joinville, near Paris, with actors from Lisbon’s popular theatre and revue. The first, A Canção do Berço, opened in December 1930.1 source1 source

Subtitles for foreign talkies drove part of the audience away, above all in neighbourhood and provincial cinemas. The hunger for films spoken in Portuguese grew. Critics wanted more than Portuguese dialogue in Paris studios: in the slogan of the critic M. Félix Ribeiro, they wanted Portuguese cinema, made by Portuguese, in Portugal.2 sources2 sources

A Canção de Lisboa is sometimes called the first Portuguese talkie. It was not. That title belongs to A Severa, José Leitão de Barros’s version of Júlio Dantas’s play about the nineteenth-century fado singer Maria Severa. With no sound studio in Portugal, Leitão de Barros shot the outdoor scenes at home without sound, then filmed the interiors with synchronised sound and did the post-production at the French Tobis studios at Épinay, outside Paris.3 sources3 sources

A Severa opened at the São Luiz in June 1931, with the President of the Republic and members of the government in the audience, and was a box-office hit for half a year. Leitão de Barros later said its success was what led him, the director Chianca de Garcia, João Ortigão Ramos, the distributor Castello Lopes and others to found Tobis Portuguesa.2 sources2 sources

So the claim for A Canção de Lisboa is narrower: it was the first sound feature both shot and sound-recorded entirely in Portugal. The words matter. The art historian Hugo Barreira calls it the first sound film “entirely produced in Portugal”, while Tiago Baptista, a Cinemateca curator, calls A Severa the first sound film produced in Portugal, because a Portuguese company made it.4 sources4 sources

Even the narrower claim has a footnote. Tobis Portuguesa’s equipment was bought from the international Tobis group, and the crew mixed Portuguese and foreign technicians, some of them there to prepare Portuguese professionals for the switch to sound.3 sources3 sources

The Companhia Portuguesa de Filmes Sonoros Tobis Klangfilm was formally created in June 1932, after a public share subscription that Cinéfilo hailed as a success. Its base was the Quinta das Conchas, an estate in Lumiar, in the north of Lisbon. The state helped with a five-year exemption from property and industrial taxes and from import duties on equipment. Among the founders, with a seat on its production council, was the journalist António Ferro.3 sources3 sources

A decree-law of 1933 granting tax breaks to the new laboratories put the government’s interest plainly: sound cinema was “a powerful means of education and culture” whose influence could be used “with great profit for the Nation”.1 source1 source

The studios were not finished in time for the company’s first film. Cottinelli Telmo’s crew built six interior sets in the estate’s abegoaria, a farm outbuilding: three rooms of the tailor’s shop, the medical school’s exam hall, the aunts’ parlour and a recreation club. Other sets on the estate stood in for a small Lisbon square and a fado house.2 sources2 sources

Much of the rest was shot on real locations: the arcades of the Praça do Comércio, Rossio station, with the noise of its locomotives left on the soundtrack, the Jardim Zoológico, and a dream wedding in Sintra filmed without sound. The press reported that it was the first Portuguese film shot after dark, under lamps so strong that one projector alone was rated at 10,000 candles.2 sources2 sources

Casting drew crowds. On 1 May 1933 about 200 young women tried for parts at the Automóvel Clube de Portugal. Young men gathered outside to heckle them as they left, and a policeman had to be called when the crowd threatened to push its way in. The monkeys at the zoo were harder to direct. Cinematógrafo reported that they must have had indigestion from peanuts and carrots.1 source1 source

Vasco Leitão is a medical student who lives on an allowance from two aunts in Trás-os-Montes. They trust him and have never seen Lisbon. He prefers parties, popular songs and pretty women, above all Alice, a seamstress in the Castelo neighbourhood, whose father, the tailor Caetano, disapproves of Vasco’s debts. On the same day he fails his final exam, a letter arrives: the aunts are coming to visit.2 sources2 sources

They find his furniture out in the square, put there by his landlord, the shoemaker. Vasco is about to confess when the shoemaker and the tailor, who both have their eyes on the old ladies’ money, rescue him with a tale of his feats as a doctor who “sacrificed opulence to scientific discovery”. Their patter turns into a cegada, a sung street routine, the neighbours join in and a policeman marches the whole troupe off to the station.2 sources2 sources

After a row at a June street party Alice stops speaking to him, and her father withdraws his support. Then the lie falls apart at the zoo, and Vasco loses the aunts’ money and their trust. Drunk, in a fado house, he delivers a tirade against fado, then sits alone on the steps, sings his misfortune and turns out to be the best fadista in the room.2 sources2 sources

The cast came from Lisbon’s stage. Vasco Santana, born in Benfica in 1898, had worked in revue and operetta since 1917, and this was his first leading role on screen. Beatriz Costa, born in 1907, had started as a chorus girl at 15; the film made her name, and she became an icon of the revue theatre. António Silva played Caetano. Manoel de Oliveira, then a young actor from Porto who later turned director, played Vasco’s friend Carlos and wrote up the shoot for the magazine Imagem.4 sources4 sources

The songs grow out of the action, as the cegada does. The June street party ends in a torchlight march as a paper balloon rises over the crowd. Alice, who dreams of the stage, is crowned Miss Castelinho, queen of the neighbourhood’s seamstresses, then stumbles through the one-step “A Agulha e o Dedal” (“The Needle and the Thimble”). Barreira points to the joke: Beatriz Costa, a revue star, playing an amateur who makes a hash of a revue number.2 sources2 sources

The scene everyone remembers is the one at the zoo, where his rival Quincas and the aunts catch Vasco out. Between failed attempts to make off with other men’s hats he shouts “Chapéus há muitos, seu palerma!”, “There are plenty of hats, you idiot!” He keeps repeating it to an invisible listener as he walks away, and audiences took the line home with them.3 sources3 sources

Not everyone was won over. Tickets cost more than cinemas usually asked, and in October Cinéfilo ran a headline asking why Portuguese films were dearer. The magazine argued that anyone happy to pay 8 escudos would gladly pay two more, since foreign films, opera and theatre also cost more, and called the grumblers the “worst fauna” of the public. The film had cost 870 contos, a fortune at the time. The row did not hurt the box office: like A Severa, it drew more than 100,000 spectators in the 1930s.2 sources2 sources

Some critics accused Cottinelli Telmo of copying the French director René Clair, especially his 1933 film Quatorze Juillet. Barreira finds Clair in the sound gags, such as a line of passing lorries whose din lets Vasco escape, much as banging café doors play with what we hear in Clair’s film. But he notes that the plot and the use of music are clearly different.2 sources2 sources

In Porto, the critic Alberto Armando Pereira called it “a conscious, positive piece of work” in the weekly Cinema on 25 November 1933. The writer José Gomes Ferreira, an assistant editor on the film, wrote a report of the premiere that Barreira cites among the texts naming Clair as a main influence.4 sources4 sources

A Canção de Lisboa is treated as the founding film of the “comédia à portuguesa”, the Portuguese comedy. The film historian João Bénard da Costa wrote that there was not one comedy after it that did not depend on it. The recipe came from revue theatre: a string of sketches, social stereotypes, comic actors from the revue stage and songs.2 sources2 sources

The regime’s attitude to these films was mixed. In September 1933, two months before the premiere, it created the Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional (SPN) and put António Ferro in charge. Ferro wanted a dignified, artistic cinema that could be shown abroad. He called the comedies a “cancer of national cinema”.2 sources2 sources

Law 2027 of 18 February 1948, the law for the protection of national cinema, created a National Cinema Fund run by the SNI, as the propaganda office was by then called. Its money went to films judged to express the Portuguese spirit, and it made a censorship certificate a condition for screening any film. The comedies were private ventures that had to fill cinemas and get past the censors.2 sources2 sources

Vasco Diogo argues that, within those limits, the comedies were the freest films of their time. In A Canção de Lisboa a label reading “Estado Novo”, pinned to a coat in the tailor’s shop, ends up on a customer’s backside. At the Miss Castelinho contest the jurors vote by the colour of the dresses, in a black-and-white film, and a woman in the audience declares that it was all a swindle and they should leave.1 source1 source

The hat line outlived the hats. Portuguese still say “chapéus há muitos” to shrug off a small loss, and in 2023 an Observador columnist borrowed it for a piece about ministers resigning. Mário Soares’s presidential campaign of 1985–86 used “chapéus há muitos” to mock the plastic hats worn by supporters of his rival, Diogo Freitas do Amaral. Vasco Diogo points out that the line works because the film repeats it until it can be lifted out of the story and used anywhere.2 sources2 sources

The comedies it started are probably the most-watched Portuguese films of all, counting cinema, television and video audiences, and many people remember them as a single film “with Vasco Santana and António Silva”. A new version directed by Pedro Varela opened in cinemas in 2016.3 sources3 sources

The film is also a record of Lisbon in 1933: the Praça do Comércio, the Rossio station, the zoo, and the trams and street cries that Cottinelli Telmo put on the soundtrack. The Cinemateca still screens it, with a programme note by Luís de Pina that ends with the verdict that it “continues new”.3 sources3 sources