From the 1964 Metrocolor beach party movie “Get Yourself a College Girl”, “Garota de Ipanema” (“The Girl from Ipanema”).
The plot involves a college co-ed who tries to balance her time writing songs and dealing with her publisher who tries to pursue her. The music and performances is what makes the movie worth watching, The Dave Clark Five, The Animals and more. This cameo, featuring Stan Getz playing behind a very unique, cool, near deadpan performance by Astrud Gilberto, is certainly one high point, making them instant international hits. Gilberto is best known for her performance of the song. This sequence alone should snare jazz fans to this retro film.
Ipanema is a fashionable seaside neighborhood located in the southern region of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto (Helô Pinheiro), a seventeen-year-old girl living on Montenegro Street in Ipanema would stroll daily past the Veloso bar-café, not just to the beach (“each day when she walks to the sea”), but in the everyday course of her life. She would sometimes enter the bar to buy cigarettes for her mother and leave to the sound of wolf-whistles. The composers saw the girl, in the winter of 1962, and of course she inspired them. The song became instantly popular and she a celebrity.
In 2001, the song’s copyright owners (heirs of their composer fathers) sued Pinheiro for using the title of the song as the name of her boutique (Garota de Ipanema). In their complaint, they stated that her status as The Girl from Ipanema (Garota de Ipanema) does not entitle her to use a name that legally belongs to them. The courts ruled in favor of Pinheiro.
