CINE DORADO: O is for La Otra

David Wingrove returns with another installment in his alphabet of Mexican melodrama. One correction — the first theremin in movies featured in Miklos Rosza’s score for THE LOST WEEKEND, in 1945.

 CINE DORADO

The Golden Age of Mexican Melodrama

O is for La otra (The Other One)

A life that could have been but was not.

A fate that chose the most twisted and tortuous paths.

- Dolores del Río in La otra (1946)

Watching the credits to La otra, you could be forgiven for expecting a sci-fi movie. The camera drifts in outer space, planets aglow in varying shapes and sizes, while a theremin wails frantically on the soundtrack. (The use of this instrument in La otra may well be a movie first.) We might be at a low-budget, black-and-white preview of Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! Yet this film, as we shall see, takes place on a planet infinitely stranger and more glamorous than Mars…

In the opening scene, a crowd gathers to mourn a dead millionaire. His widow – her face hidden by a black veil – steps daintily out of a hearse. A mousy woman with glasses pushes through the crowd and fights her way to the widow’s side. As the ladies stand shoulder to (padded) shoulder by the open grave, the inconsolable wife turns to the intruder and hisses: “Couldn’t you find something better to wear?”

The first big hit for its director Roberto Gavaldón, and an acting tour de force for its star Dolores del Río, La otra (1946) is the Mexican melodrama that defines the entire genre. It is also one of the grandest and most flamboyant ‘women’s pictures’ of the 40s. The lovely Dolores plays not one but both those ladies at the graveside – who are, in fact, twin sisters. The wealthy Magdalena is vain, frivolous, grasping, cruel, selfish and generally vile. Her impoverished sibling, María, is pure, virtuous and hard working. Yet her life is poisoned by jealousy and hatred of the sister who has everything she does not.

Such casting was par for the course in the 40s, when no movie diva of any stature was content to play just one role in a film. In 1944, audiences in Mexico had thrilled to María Félix as blonde and dark femmes fatales in Amok and – from that other film industry north of the border – Maria Montez as good and evil twins in Cobra Woman. In the same year as La otra, Hollywood made ‘twin’ movies with Bette Davis (A Stolen Life) and Olivia de Havilland (The Dark Mirror). Davis – in a final bizarre twist – would remake the plot of La otra in her 1964 vehicle Dead Ringer.

Yet while the twin sisters in Hollywood films embody polar opposites of Good and Evil, the siblings in La otra are both corrupt and vicious to varying degrees. After the funeral, the two repair to the wealthy sister’s mansion, a fantasia of white caryatids and chessboard marble floors. Taking pity for once on her sister, Magdalena flings open her closets (a scene that foreshadows Written on the Wind) and throws a few unwanted designer gowns in her direction. “No, not that one!” she says, having second thoughts. “I’ve promised that one to the maid.”

While callous Magdalena is fretting over her mourning outfits, poor frumpy María sits at the dressing table and wraps herself, for comfort, in one of her sister’s priceless fur stoles. The butler comes in to announce tea and sees her reflection in the giant mirror. He assumes, naturally, that she is the lady of the house. A strange light flickers, momentarily, in María’s eyes. We know, at that moment, that a dangerous (and probably lethal) plot is about to be hatched.

Leaving the mansion, María overhears the staff gossiping about the 5 million pesos her sister stands to inherit. Out in the street, it’s Christmas Eve and the whole of Mexico City is lottery-mad. The jackpot, of course, is 5 million pesos! This sum passes her on the sides of buses, flashes at her from neon signs. It even hangs over the bar where she goes with her detective boyfriend (played by Argentine tango singer Agustín Irusta). When she rails against her poverty, he says in horror: “I don’t recognise you when you talk like that. It’s as if you’d become another woman!”

In the film’s bravura set piece, María telephones Magdalena and announces she is going to commit suicide. Mildly annoyed by such histrionics, Magdalena summons her chauffeur and drives to the squalid garret where her sister lives. She climbs the stair in the courtyard, as firecrackers explode around her and children sing hymns in a candlelit procession. At the top of the stairs, María is waiting with a gun. She points it at Magdalena – but we do not see or hear the shot. Instead, a child smashes the head of a piñata hanging in the courtyard; it bursts open, with a deafening bang.

Upstairs, Magdalena is slumped in a rocking chair. Dead. In a scene too graphic and visceral for a Hollywood film, María strips naked in silhouette. She then begins, slowly, to peel off the dead woman’s silk stockings. Finally, dressed in her sister’s clothes, she walks down the stairs to the waiting limousine. (She almost forgets to take off her glasses – but she leaves them on the table, with a suicide note, in the nick of time.) She gets into the car and drives off towards her new life.

Not that she ever has much fun. Soon, she has to witness the late husband’s will. Unable to forge Magdalena’s signature, she burns her right hand with a hot poker so she can sign with her left. We watch the poker as it heats up slowly on an open fire; we get a close-up of del Río’s exquisite face as it contorts in agony. A few scenes later, a sleazy moustachioed gigolo (Victor Junco) shows up and demands her gratitude – sexual and financial – for helping her to poison her husband. Poor María has no choice but to give in. As she was clearly too respectable to sleep with her boyfriend, we wonder if this new man will notice she’s a virgin…

But even Mexican movies, at their most florid, have to draw a veil over some things. A triumph for Gavaldón’s operatic mise en scène – all multiplying mirrors and ominous shadows – La otra is the equal of any classic Hollywood melodrama of the 40s. The performance(s) of Dolores del Río can rank with the best of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyck. Mind you, I’m still not sure why they needed those planets. La otra is in a dimension all of its own.

David Melville

F is for Flor Silvestre

David Wingrove was reluctant to depart from alphabetical order for his Cine Dorado series — “That’s the only source of cohesion I’ve got!” —  but was persuaded to do so in order that Maria Felix’s last film, LA GENERALA, could land in the Late Show Late Movies Blogathon last week. “I suppose as long as I WRITE them in alphabetical order…” So here, at last, is the delayed letter F, standing for FLOR SILVESTRE… and maybe also for Emilio Fernandez?

CINE DORADO

The Golden Age of Mexican Melodrama 

F is for Flor silvestre (Wild Flower) 

Roots that grow together can never grow apart.

Although it’s one of the films that inaugurated the Golden Age of Mexican Melodrama, Flor silvestre (1943) is far from being the most interesting. In her triumphal return home from 15 years in Hollywood, Dolores del Río stars as an insufferably virtuous peasant girl who marries a sickeningly noble and self-sacrificing rich boy (Pedro Armendáriz) on the eve of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. His land-owning father, naturally, is less than impressed. “The stars will fall from heaven before a son of mine marries the daughter of a nobody!” “That’s what I want, father,” says Pedro, his eyes a-twinkle with revolutionary fervour. “To make the stars fall from heaven!”

Dramatically, this is hackneyed stuff. Artistically and ideologically, though, Flor silvestre is a work of vast importance. Like certain films from Germany and Italy around the same time (Rolf Hansen’s Die große Liebe/The Great Love (1942) starring Zarah Leander, or Mario Soldati’s Piccolo mondo antico/Little Old-Fashioned World (1941) starring Alida Valli) it conceives an entire nation, its fears and aspirations, in terms of romantic melodrama. It is impossible, in this film, to separate the destiny of the two lovers from the fate if Mexico as a whole. Their love story is inextricably linked to notions of class equality and social justice.

The director, Emilio Fernández, was clearly angling for this sort of national myth-making. The most resonant images are not the turgid family quarrels and perfunctory scenes of courtship, marriage and childbirth – but, rather, the musical interludes, in which the plot takes a breather and Fernandez stages his vision of Mexican society in near-operatic terms. Early on, at a fiesta, a peasant girl sings a ranchera ballad while the landowners fan themselves under an awning, and the workers bake under a fierce afternoon sun. A few scenes later, a mariachi band plays off-screen as Pedro rides across a stark landscape of clouds and cacti (dazzling photography by Gabriel Figueroa) with Dolores’ peasant grandfather. We see the two men, at first, from a distance; by the end of the song, they are side by side in close-up – and both dead drunk on tequila. When the Revolution turns sour – and thuggish bandidos loot the family hacienda – the camera pans over a chorus of half-naked men, sprawling on the floor and singing a lament to dreams gone wrong.

All of which makes Dolores del Río, one of the very greatest of Mexican stars, seem almost like an extra in her own movie. (She came, ironically enough, from a land-owning family that had been ruined by the Revolution – and entered showbiz only because her once aristocratic parents were now penniless.) Dolores, as ever, is ravishing to behold. Whether lying in bed recovering from a near-fatal buggy crash, or fleeing across the desert from a rapacious bandido (her new-born son cradled in her arms) she looks as if she has her own personal Hollywood beautician stationed just off camera. She does, incredibly, manage to play the heroine’s unwavering goodness without ever once becoming sickly or tedious. But if you’ve seen Dolores in more complex roles – the spoiled rich girl in Bugambilia, the good and evil twins in La otra – it’s as if Vivien Leigh had missed out on Scarlett O’Hara, and got stuck playing Melanie Hamilton instead.

As her love interest, Armendáriz is equally stalwart and uninteresting. Given the lack of any dramatic tension between them, Fernández understandably grows bored with his romantic leads and gets sidetracked into ever more lurid and gratuitous imagery. An angelic chorus croons (incongruously) off screen as Pedro hunts down the varmint who killed his father, then strings the corpse up over the old man’s grave. Kidnapped by the bad man’s brother, Dolores is made to crawl across the floor of a brothel, begging for her life and the life of her child, while a chorus of hookers and bandits jeer and guffaw at her agonies. At the end, when Pedro faces a firing squad, Dolores flings her arms round him and begs to be shot as well. Not once, but three times. Flor silvestre is not dull by any means. Except dramatically, as Fernández seems unable to conceive of a lead character with a single redeeming flaw.

Of course, I’m being unfair. Pedro and Dolores are not characters at all, in the conventional sense, but symbolic archetypes of the Mexican nation – so any drama between them might well be considered unpatriotic. The fascination of Flor silvestre lies less in what it is than in what it began. Emilio Fernandez, with the help of two gorgeous and iconic stars, is giving a nation (and, by extension, the whole of Latin America) a way of seeing itself on film. There will, inevitably, be far more interesting aspects to see. But first of all, we have to start looking. 

David Melville

B is for Bugambilia

Part two of David Melville’s occasional alphabet of golden-age Mexican melodrama!

CINE DORADO

The Golden Age of Mexican Melodrama

B is for Bugambilia

Fans of old Hollywood may remember Dolores del Rio as a ravishing beauty who couldn’t act. Moving from Mexico to the US in the late 20s, she played decorative roles in largely mediocre films. Even the classic South Seas romance Bird of Paradise (King Vidor, 1932) used her less as an actress than as a live Gauguin painting. The musical Wonder Bar (Lloyd Bacon, 1934) gave her little to do beyond a sadomasochist tango with whips. By the early 40s, not even her liaison with Orson Welles could get Dolores a role in a decent film.

So it was a shock all round when Dolores – who was just short of 40 – returned home to Mexico, and promptly became her country’s reigning dramatic star. Her role as a virginal peasant girl in María Candelaria (Emilio Fernandez, 1943) proved that yes, she could act after all. Just not in English (in which she never seemed at ease) and not in the frankly unactable roles that Hollywood chose to give her. At a time when the US industry, cut off from its European audience, was making half-hearted efforts to woo the Latin American market, the romantic melodramas of del Rio and Fernandez were proof – glorious proof – that latinos could go it alone.

The fourth and most lavish of these is Bugambilia (1945). (The title, and the heroine’s nickname, is a florid purple flower that runs wild on every available wall in hot climates.) In this one, Dolores (refreshingly) does not play a poor but virtuous peasant waif, albeit one who strays in photogenic and melodramatic ways. Her role here draws on her own upper-class background. (Her family, like that of her distant cousin Ramón Novarro, had lost much of their land and fortune to the Mexican Revolution.) Here she plays a spoiled and capricious 19^th century coquette, flouncing about in crinolines and bathing in an Olympic-size marble bathtub, afloat with rose petals.

Her character, of course, is instantly recognisable as Bette Davis in Jezebel (William Wyler, 1938) or Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) or even Elizabeth Taylor in Raintree County (Edward Dmytryk, 1957). Yet much of our pleasure in Mexican melodrama lies in the way it emulates Hollywood models – yet also transforms them in unexpected, often subversive ways. Her key relationship, for most of the film, is not with her love interest (Pedro Armendáriz) but with her fiercely possessive (indeed, borderline incestuous) father. A rich widower, he cherishes her as “something more than a daughter…more like a living copy of her mother.” A huge Gothic portrait hangs on the wall, Rebecca-style, as if to prove the point.

Into this menage comes Armendáriz – a swarthy, moustachioed peasant whose profession (in a stroke of none-too-subtle symbolism) is that of cock fighter. He drops in to introduce his prize cock to del Rio’s prize laying hen. In what is surely a first for a ‘family’ movie, the cock mounts the hen while Dolores – her eyes widening in her exquisitely sculpted face – does a creditable job of looking shocked. Later on, she attends a grand ball, where she knows her lover is watching from the street outside, and has an enormous sequinned cock (of the bird variety) spangled on her fan.

We know, of course, that the liaison is doomed. Class barriers normally prove to be insuperable in Mexican movies, with a cynicism (or, perhaps, an honesty) that is rare in films from north of the Río Grande. Still, the ball scene is the film’s lyrical highlight, an orgy of billowing gowns and sparkling chandeliers that’s easily comparable to Vincente Minnelli’s film of Madame Bovary (1949). Platoons of waltzing ladies spread across the floor, petal-like, in overhead shots that might have been engineered by Busby Berkeley’s long-lost Mexican cousin.

An obsessively literal-minded viewer might complain (as Michael Caine did after a trip to Mexico) that del Rio and Armendáriz always look like film stars and never look like anything else, and “that is what is wrong with Mexican films.” Such a complaint is only slightly more logical than watching a performance of Swan Lake and saying that Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn always look like ballet dancers – as if that detracts, somehow, from their dancing. We are dealing, in both cases, with a stylised art form that appeals on a supra-literal level of archetype and myth. No sane person, least of all a working class Mexican viewer of the 40s, would take Bugambilia for an exercise in gritty realism.

In fact, the opening and closing scenes (the bulk of the film is a long flashback) move Bugambilia away from the genre we think we recognise and into the realm of a Gothic ghost story. The mise-en-scene shifts to that of Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) or Dragonwyck (Joseph L Mankiewicz, 1946) or Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle, 1948). Our heroine, sobered by her inevitable defeat, walls herself up inside her crumbling ancestral mansion. The camera (directed by the legendary Gabriel Figueroa) pulls back in a spectacular crane shot; we sense the ghosts of Miss Havisham and Norma Desmond hovering just outside the frame. Dolores del Rio is easily their equal in the high melodrama stakes. A pity that nobody in Hollywood had the sense to see it.

David Melville