Cine Dorado: K is for Konga Roja

Regular co-Shadowplayer David Melville presents the eleventh installment of his handy-dandy alphabet of Mexican melodrama — he is to be congratulated on finding a Mexican movie beginning with the letter “K,” a letter which does not even exist in the Spanish alphabet… now read on –

CINE DORADO 

The Golden Age of Mexican Melodrama 

K is for Konga roja

It’s a steamy tropical night. A boat chugs its way down river into a seedy jungle port. The whole scene is swathed in darkness and mist. The only light is the beam from a lighthouse – which pulses and illuminates the scene in flashes, like a strobe. Directed by Alejandro Galindo in 1942, Konga roja takes place in a world of dazzling light and deepest shadow. Not sure if this look has a name, but you could call it ‘tropical noir’

The boat docks in the seedy town of Puerto Largo. Even though it’s midnight, a chorus of peons are waving their sombreros excitedly from the dock. A swarthy fat man, with a ragged moustache and three days’ growth of stubble, trundles up the gangplank and warns the captain to hoist his anchor and be gone by sunrise. “Strange boats aren’t welcome in Puerto Largo!” The captain looks suitably chastised – but Pedro Armendáriz, our hero, swans off the boat and onto the dock with the sort of élan that only a Mexican film star can muster.

Mexico’s great matinee idol of the Golden Age, Armendáriz is an imposing figure of a man. His white linen suit clings, like a second skin, to his muscular bronze body. His Panama hat casts a shadow, sexily, across his dark moustachioed face. (His is, in truth, the most formidable moustache this side of Freddy Mercury.) He checks into the town’s once hotel, and it’s no surprise that half the town seems to drop into his room while he’s taking a shower. I was wondering that the management didn’t hang a sign outside and sell tickets.

He has a typically heroic role as the loner who brings justice to a corrupt town. An agent for a big North American fruit company, he’s come to investigate shady goings on in the local banana trade. (In a witty reversal of the usual Hollywood cliché, this Latino hero even has a fat, clueless gringo sidekick called Mr Powers.) It seems a gang of nefarious crooks is sabotaging the town’s banana shipments – and will stop at nothing to see Pedro doesn’t find out. “We still use machetes to harvest our bananas,” growls one shady character. “And machetes, as you know, have other uses.”

Not being an expert in the marketing of tropical fruit – and missing, doubtless, some of the finer points in the unsubtitled Spanish dialogue – I can’t quite see the financial incentive for anybody in not selling a boatload of ripe bananas. (Indeed, I half expected Groucho Marx to show up and announce that customers must pay extra for buying the fruit and not eating it!) Still, that’s the cod-Hitcockian MacGuffin on which this action thriller seems to hang.

A kingpin in this nefarious scheme turns out to be Pedro’s long-lost bosom pal (the suave but rather oily Tito Junco) who saved his life years ago in Puerto Rico. We know at once that Tito’s a big man in town. He has a flunky to walk behind him and hold a parasol over his head. He’s also running a tandem with two of the ladies who entertain at the local nightspot, The Seven Seas. (What else would you call a bar that’s God-knows-how-many miles up a river?)

Like any other sleazy movie bar in the middle of nowhere, The Seven Seas boasts a roster of top musical talent. (Ludicrous, yes, but no more so than Rick’s Café American in Casablanca, which was shot in Hollywood the same year.) The big attraction is María Antonieta Pons, a Cuban rumba-dancer who became a huge star in Mexican films of the 40s. She doesn’t so much sing and dance as shout and gyrate enthusiastically, and her acting makes María Félix look like Eleonora Duse. Still, all she has to do is provide a visually attractive love interest, and she does it adequately enough.

Tito lusts after María Antonieta but it’s Pedro who wins her heart. We know this right from their first encounter, when she slaps him hard across the face for not paying attention during her big number. She even makes a number of impassioned speeches that call Pedro’s stalwart heroism into question. (“Women don’t love a man because he’s brave, or love him any less because he’s a coward. We just love. That’s all we know how to do!”) Also on the bill is an Afro-Caribbean chanteuse named Toña la Negra. She genuinely loves the slimy Tito – and what’s more, she can genuinely sing.

The big question of who is doing what to whose bananas seems to work out smoothly enough – but only after Pedro and Tito find themselves on opposite sides of the law! Galindo keeps it all going with his spectacular pre-noir lighting (the cameraman is one Victor Herrera) and some moments of sharp visual wit. When a gun battle breaks out in The Seven Seas, the card-players simply duck under the table and keep on playing. When Pedro and the chief bad guy face off at the end, the whole bar freezes with suspense. The barman, who’s in the middle of pouring a shot of tequila, just lets it overflow and dribble onto the bar.

The final shoot-out, in the street outside the bar, has a shadowed splendour that anticipates Carol Reed and The Third Man. Pedro and the villain stalk each other in pitch darkness and deathly silence – illuminated only, at key moments, by that all-important lighthouse. (It also shines, conveniently enough, just outside María Antonieta’s window, adding some much-needed mood and atmosphere to the love scenes.) Justice being duly done, we can go home, knowing our bananas will be on sale at their usual price.

Things did not end quite so smoothly, alas, for Pedro Armendáriz. His career began with a string of heroic roles for Mexico’s most illustrious director, Emilio Fernández (María Candelaria, Enamorada, Río Escondido). Later, he made forays to Hollywood to work for John Ford (Fort Apache, Three Godfathers) and to Europe to star in costume romances with Martine Carol (Lucrezia Borgia) and Lana Turner (Diane).

In 1963, just before playing the Turkish Chief of Police in the James Bond movie From Russia with Love, Armendáriz was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Once his work was finished, he asked director Terence Young if any retakes would be needed. When the answer was ‘no’ he flew home to Los Angeles and shot himself in the head.

His death left the Mexican cinema without a hero. No actor in the last 50 years has been up to the job.

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