In 1939, the Portuguese musical talkie returns with Chianca de Garcia's Aldeia da Roupa Branca, a comedy set in Lisbon's saloio countryside near Malveira. The Portuguese had not made the Portuguese laugh and sing at the movies since Cottinelli Telmo's A Canção de Lisboa, six years earlier; therefore a hearty national comedy was long overdue. António Ferro and the SPN's grip on national cinema, with the goal of using it to promote the regime's ideals through historical films, adaptations of nineteenth-century national literature, documentaries, and propaganda, was beginning to wear thin for an audience facing uncertain allegiances before the impending Second World War. By the late 1930s, the only film besides A Severa and Canção that had made a significant impact at the box office was Leitão de Barros's adaptation of Júlio Dinis's novel As Pupilas do Senhor Reitor (1935): a film that indulged the Portuguese in their escape to a pre-Republican Portugal as an alternative to the austerity of the present. The Italian model of fascism that used popular film successfully to seduce the masses toward its modernizing mission was teetering toward failure in Portugal, where nostalgia continued to serve as an antidote for bleakness and despair. Only a comedy as effective as Cottinelli's Canção could lift the Portuguese spirits, as the nation braced itself for war.

In the fervor of bringing German sound-film technology to Portugal at the beginning of the decade, Chianca had thrown in his bid along with Leitão de Barros and Cottinelli Telmo to direct the nation's first talkie. However, when Chianca proposed a primordial version of Aldeia da Roupa Branca as the second Portuguese talkie, his production was postponed for half a decade. Chianca's role in the earliest phases of the Portuguese talkie is evident in Aldeia's continuation of a trend that Leitão de Barros and Cottinelli Telmo had started in the early 1930s but that the 1933 inauguration of the SPN and its control over national cinematic production thwarted.

Both A Severa and Canção use music – a combination of fado, marchas, and folklore – to entertain their audiences; however, neither film can be considered a musical within the strictest definition of the genre.