Beyond the expatriate 1950s films of the brilliant Spaniard Luis Bunuel, Mexican film is frequently the neglected stepchild of cinema of the Americas. The recent arthouse hit “Like Water for Chocolate” may change that perception; so may other works by contemporary directors Alfonso Arau, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Maria Novaro and Arturo Ripstein. If not, the “Classic Mexican Cinema” series at the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute (Columbus Drive at Jackson Boulevard)-at least gives us more perspective.
The series starts at 6 p.m. Thursday with the 1948 musical comedy “Tender Little Pumpkins” (repeated at 4 p.m. Saturday). “Pumpkins” stars the second-ranking Mexican movie comedian, German Valdes, or “Tin-Tan”; the top banana, of course, was Cantinflas (Mario Moreno Reyes), who died last year.
Like Cantinflas, Tin-Tan came out of Mexican musical variety shows. He even resembles his colleague: short, slight, with black hair and a thin mustache. But there similarities end. Tin-Tan was a brash, zoot-suited hustler, and this movie, directed by Gilberto Martinez Solares, has him mistaken for a show-biz entrepreneur and putting together an all-star cabaret show, one step ahead of the creditors and cops.
It’s an amusing formula entertainment. Formulaic as well are “The Adventuress” and “A New Dawn” (6 and 8 p.m. Saturday), directed by Alberto Gout and Julio Bracho, respectively. “The Adventuress” (1949), starring hot-tempered Cuban rumba queen Ninon Sevilla, is about a “decent girl” forced into prostitution-which, here, consists mostly of dancing in elaborate rumba nightclub numbers while wearing banana and pineapple headdresses. When Sevilla’s madam turns out to be a society matriarch with a marriageable son, mad complications ensue.
“A New Dawn” (1943), taken seriously in its day, and possibly influenced by Marcel Carne films, is about a trio of reformist progressives caught in a film noir world of spies, scandal and betrayal-plus more sambas and rumbas.
The four other opening week films are more serious-and, Tin-Tan’s deft slapstick excepted, more artistic. Alejandro Galindo’s 1953 “Wetbacks” (6 p.m. Sunday) is a scathing portrayal of illegal U.S. immigration, an odyssey on the run, in which an impoverished Mexican crosses the border, encountering persecution and tragedy. Alberto Isaac’s 1964 “In This Town There Are No Thieves” (6 p.m. Friday), from a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story, is an interestingly bleak, if fuzzily photographed, low-budget look at crime and fate in a town so poor that the theft of the pool hall’s billiard balls triggers economic crisis.
If you’re selective, this week’s top two series picks are definitely Emilio Fernandez’s 1948 “Maclovia” (4 p.m. Sunday) and Luis Alcoriza’s 1962 “Shark Hunters” (7:45 p.m. Friday). Fernandez-who as an actor was the prototypical Mexican tyrant in Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” and “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia”-once claimed, “I am the Mexican cinema!” In the ’40s, that was very nearly true. Fernandez, his great cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, and emblematic stars Dolores Del Rio, Pedro Armendariz and Maria Felix, dominated Mexico’s international film image. Felix and Armendariz star in “Maclovia,” perhaps the most physically beautiful Fernandez film: a poet-symbolic evocation of star-crossed romance and political oppression, whose central theme of anti-Indian prejudice obviously touched Fernandez, whose nickname was “El Indio.” He and Figueroa create a bewitching symphony of chiaroscuro and hauntingly lyrical images.
Luis Alcoriza was Bunuel’s longtime screenwriter on “Los Olvidados” and many others. His “Shark Hunters,” full of rich social detail and ensemble playing, is set in a milieu much like “Maclovia’s,” but shown more realistically: a small coastal fishing city where a charismatic emigre (Julio Aldama) discovers a freer, stronger life than the business career and family he left in Mexico City. It’s a neglected gem.
– John Ford’s classic “Stagecoach,” shown at the Film Center at 6 p.m. Tuesday on Susan Doll’s Western lecture series, revolutionized the genre when it appeared in 1939. Based by Ford and writer Dudley Nichols on Ernest Haycox’s “Stage to Lordsburg”-but modeled, Ford insisted, on Guy De Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif”-it became the first and most famous of the “adult Westerns.”
With its tale of seven socially mismatched passengers on a perilous journey through Apache country, it’s an archetypal film poem of crisis, action, revenge and redemption. The cast-John Wayne and Claire Trevor as the outlaw lovers, Thomas Mitchell as the quintessential drunken doctor, John Carradine as the genteel Southern cardsharp, George Bancroft and Andy Devine driving the stage-are perfect; the settings, in Monument Valley, are breathtaking, the action furious.
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