Posting this merely to record a vivid illustration of changes in Spanish culture after the death of Franco in 1975. The first Rocio Durcal film on the left if from 1971, the one on the right is from 77. A lot happened very quickly.
José Arroyo
Quiet, meditative, sensitive, gradual. Not the first words that come to mind when considering 2014’s vigilante thriller The Equalizer – though they do apply at times – but certainly descriptors of its sequel, which we loved. Denzel Washington’s ex-spy, Robert McCall, who had managed to extricate himself from a life of state-sanctioned violence and murder, now works as a vigilante for hire, an avenger, conducts himself as a role model, mentor, and cheerleader for those whose lives with which he comes into contact.
We discuss The Equalizer 2‘s ethos of personal responsibility and self-improvement, and its meditative tone. José orates on his love of Denzel and his position as perhaps the most significant figure of black masculinity throughout the history of cinema. Mike adores Antoine Fuqua’s aesthetic of long lenses, shallow focus and moody lighting; a visual sensibility that looks wonderful and intimidating on the big screen, but somehow makes small screens seem big too.
While it’s certainly cut from the same cloth as the first film, The Equalizer 2 is more confident to bask in contemplation and even a kind of plotlessness, and it’s not quite what you’d expect. We think it’s great. Worth seeing while it’s in cinemas.
The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.
With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.
Pecado de amor is camp enough at the beginning: Sara Montiel is Sor Bélen, a nun in a woman’s jail. A young female prisoner tries to commit suicide, and by way of comfort, Sor Bélen recounts her own past as Magda Béltran, cabaret singer and baddest woman in Madrid.
Magda’s story is thus told in flashback. We see her trifling with the affections of a young man, Ángel (a very young and handsome Terence Hill acting under the name of Mario Girotti here), so in love with her he forges his father’s name on a check to buy her an expensive bracelet. She has trouble offloading him. The father, Adolfo (Reginald Kernan) gets involved, tries to buy her off, but falls in love with her instead when he discovers she’s really a nice woman from a humble background trying to do her best to raise an illegitimate daughter.
She’s about to achieve happiness with Adolfo when the manager of her nightclub and semi-pimp gets involved and she shoots him in self-defence. She’s taken to jail and at her trial denies knowledge of Adolfo so as not to ruin his career and social position. She expects to be in jail for a long time and gives her daughter up for adoption. Adolfo, however, comes to her defence. But it’s too late. She’s free but has now lost her daughter, her lover and her career and is forced to go outside Spain to seek work, an opportunity to see her garnering applause in the great capitals of Europe.
In Greece, she reunites with Adolfo, they cement their love but then he disappears suddenly. It turns out his wife, who’s been in a sanatorium in Switzerland for all these years, has recovered; and moreover it’s Adolfo who adopted her daughter and raised her to be a lady. This is all too much for Magda. The nuns taught her to pray when she was in jail; and now she decides to find comfort in God.
If the beginning was camp, I nearly fell off my chair at the end (see above) where Sor Bélen is in Church, surrounded by a glorious choir, singing at her daughter’s wedding, as she stifles a sob whilst the camera cuts to her former young lover now married and with his wife, then to his father, the man she loved but can’t have, and then to a stained glass window in Church. The official sinner of the Spanish cinema of those years thus comes face to face with all her sins, in church, even as she gets redeemed and sanctified by a holy spirit voiced by the choir and pictured by the icons in the stained glass window. It’s as great an ending as Barbara Stanwyck’s in Stella Dallas, though this one will make you laugh rather than cry (but in a good way).
Like all Montiel vehicles post-El ultimo cuplé, the film is a musical melodrama. This one has great songs such as Gardel’s ‘El dia que me quieras’. Like other of her films such as El ultimo tango, Montiel does a number in drag, here Pichi (see clip above), which allows the film to show Sara to us as sinner, nun AND pimp; and as her stardom became international, she sang in other languages (here Sous les toits de Parisin French and Tinaini in agape in Greek); and as her stardom became international and the budgets of her films increased, there are little travelogue montages of beautiful and exotic places most of her audience couldn’t then actually visit but possibly dreamed of seeing (here mainly the Greek islands).
One of the IMDB comments notes that, ‘Maybe I saw another version, or the soundtrack is wrong, but I would like to make note that, in this movie, Montiel never sings “Madreselva” (she does in an album appropriately titled “El Tango”) neither (does) she sing(s) “Under the roof of Paris” since she did that in “La Violetera” (in Spanish for the Spanish version, french in the french version). This is not important but accurate.’ But for the sake of accuracy, I’d like to say that my version of Pecado de amor definitely contains both numbers, the first as part of her international tour (see the [suggestive] image on the left), and the second whilst in Greece (image below right).
In an hommage to Montiel from the TV series, ‘El Legado de…’ one of the commentators notes that one of the keys to Montiel’s appeal is that women liked her as much as men. Men may have been drawn to her sex appeal but women loved the clothes (some here by Balenciaga), the jewels, the hair-do’s, and the working out of so many sufferings women were earlier, then and later, condemned to. So many of her films are like a continuation of the ‘fallen women’ cycle of American films of the thirties but in gorgeous Eastmancolour and with highlights of music from the ‘Great Hispanic Songbook’. But unlike in America, in the Spain of the late fifties and through the sixties, sin had to be paid for not only by suffering but by, as we can see in one of the campest endings of all time, Christian redemption.
As I’ve noted before in relation to some of her other films, Montiel breaks the unspoken rule that the actor must never look directly at the camera and often does so in some of her numbers. See example below:
José Arroyo
I love musicals and I thought I’d seen every variant. But a musical melodrama about sex trafficking in the Middle East is a new one on me. Thoroughly Modern Millie (George Roy Hill, USA, 1967) was made later, a comedy, and the white slavery is something that happened to Mary Tyler Moore rather than Julie Andrews.
In La dama de Beirut, Sara Montiel is Isabel Llanos, a cabaret singer only recently sprung from jail for a crime she did not commit and on probation. Xandro ‘The Greek’ (Alain Saury) and Gloria (Magaly Noël), see her perform in a cheap dive in Barcelona, like what they see, and offer her a contract. She doesn’t have papers but they arrange to get her a false passport and get her on a boat to Beirut. There she meets and falls in love with Francis (Giancarlo de Luca). But when she arrives in Beirut it’s clear that she’s meant to be performing in a whorehouse and that singing is not the only service she’s expected to render.
Much of the film is about how the women around her are treated (drugged or beaten into performing) and deal, or fail to deal, with the circumstances they find themselves in: one of the younger girls commits suicide. Isabel, however, lets herself be picked up by an elderly gent, Dr. Costello (Fernand Gravey) a distinguished doctor, who will not only help her escape but get her to Paris and arrange a television appearance which will lead to her triumph at the legendary L’Olympia. Even better, he turns out to be the father of Francis, the handsome playboy she fell in love with on the boat. You couldn’t make this up, except, and of course, someone did.
Ladislao Vajda the legendary Polish director who worked mainly in Franco’s Spain and directed one of the great hits of the period, Marcelino pan y vino (1955), about a young boy who talks to Christ, directs this briskly, with attention to the film’s main selling points: Montiel, the sound-track, and the production values.
It’s now clear that all of Montiel’s films of this period, amongst the most successful and international in the history of Spanish cinema, follow a formula: The films are all musical melodramas rather than musical comedies. The story is strung along a series of songs chosen with great care and taste and with a best-selling sound-track in mind (see above): they include some of the great classics of the Spanish-speaking world and beyond; in this film: Perfidia, Frenesï, En Secreto (Cada noche un amor), Perdida (mulher de Ninguem), Les feuilles mortes, etc); that some of those songs will be about Spanishness (La Española, Adios Granada). That each of the songs turns into a very distinct type of number.
As you can see in the example above, where Montiel sings Perdida, most of it is shot in close-up, with Sara in 3/4 shots favouring the left side of her face. Much of the number takes place with Montiel in front of an audience shown through back-projection so that she seems to jump out of the screen, and with so much light on her face she stands out burning bright. During the number there will be cuts to Montiel in full-figure plans Américains, sometimes placed amongst the orchestra, that serve no other purpose than allow the audience to see her dress, usually cut to favour her legs. Once in a while she’ll do a little shimmy, but she really can’t dance. The focus on the close-up, most unusual in musical numbers, creates the affect of a dream-like self-absorption and narcissisim that invites devotion and worship, and as history demonstrates, has succeeded in obtaining it. Sometimes, and most unusually, Sara will also look directly at the camera (see below), as if she’s not only singing to the audience within the narrative, but directly to the viewer, to you. I’ve not seen this used so consistently, almost a trope in her films, in any other type of musicals.
The film has a whole host of ‘attractions’ for audiences of the period: the Balenciaga dresses Sara wears in the Spanish portions of the film, on location filming in Barcelona, Tangiers (passing for Beirut) and Paris, then the epitomy of all that was liberal, elegant and sophisticated (see below).
The co-stars- — Giancarlo Del Duca, Fernand Gravey, Alain Saury — are of course their own ‘attractions’ but I want to here single out Magaly Noël as the vicious Madam/ White Slaver Magaly Noël, who first rose to fame performing the great ‘Fais-moi mal, Johnny’ with Boris Vian (see clip below). Still no one should kid themselves: Sara’s films are all about Sara: singing, with new hairdos, couture clothing or risqué showbiz costumes, looking as glamorous as a whole team of people can make her and surviving what fortune throws her way in what then passed for glamorous and exotic locations in and out of Spain.
Of the film, Sara Montiel writes in her memoirs, ‘I re-encountered my first director, Ladislao Vajda, in La dama de Beirut. Vajda was one of the best directors in the history of Spanish cinema, and his films are the proof. Unfortunately, he died half-way through the filming and his assistant Luis María Delgado, took over the shooting. It’s not bad but is missing greatness.’
José Arroyo
It’s Eavesdropping’s first anniversary and we celebrate with a film Mike’s been looking forward to seeing for almost a decade. Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder was released at the tail end of the short-lived Fifties 3D craze, and has rarely been seen in that format (even at the time). But it rolls around every so often and this week came to the Electric, so we jumped at the chance to see it.
A dialogue-heavy chamber piece, Dial M for Murder might not seem the obvious choice for the spectacle of 3D, but it’s for this reason that we find it interesting. José, who has seen it before in 3D, recalls his previous impressions of the importance of items – the keys, the handbag, the scissors – and how the stereoscopy relates to it. Mike, who wrote on 3D film at university and has defended it ever since, places Dial M for Murder in context, comparing it to both 3D of the time and today, suggesting how it was ahead of its time.
Away from the 3D, we find the film slight, a trifle, though enjoyable throughout and respectful of the audience – the film’s methodical nature is lovely. We find some of the performances disappointing, and one in particular delightful. We’re glad we saw it, even though José’s spectacles were broken.
José’s note on Dial M for Murder can be found here: https://notesonfilm1.com/2013/08/07/a-note-on-dial-m-for-murder/
Recorded on 23rd August 2018.
The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.
With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.
The lesser, and less well-known Vertigo, a maternal melodrama from Mexico. As the credits unfold Mercedes (María Félix) is shown coming out of a Church in a wedding dress, though she tells her Nana that to her she’ll always be the Niña Mercedes, her little girl; in the first two minutes of the film, she has a baby, buries her husband and takes control over the large land-holding that the off-screen narrator tells us will cause her so much pain and so many tears. A minute after that, Mercedes’ daughter Gabriela (Lilia Michel) is off to school and Felix is shown old, hair humbly braided in the back of her head, with a shawl and wearing glasses. A minute after that, the daughter is back with a fiancée, Arturo (Emilio Tuero) ready to get married. The daughter convinces the mother to get rid of her mourning, and then the real trouble begins.
Out of her drab mourning clothes Mercedes looks, well like María Felix, and of course Arturo is overpowered by his desire for her. She finds herself responding as well. Meanwhile, the letters to the lawyers never seem to get there, the wedding dress doesn’t arrive, the wedding keeps getting more delayed, until one day by the river, a shot of crashing torrent of water from the nearby waterfall informs us that Arturo and Mercedes have had sex, even whilst Gabriela is wondering why the arrangements for her wedding are taking so long.
The dialogue is a combination of bad melodrama — -‘I don’t want to live chained to a lie’; ‘let’s love for a moment that must last us a lifetime’ – and folk sayings in Spanish that are taken as wisdom: ‘Speak. Don’t keep the words inside until they bite your soul’; ‘boda retrasada, boda quebrada/ a wedding delayed is a broken wedding’; ‘Happiness if for those that find it’; ‘What fault have I of what life has made of me?’; ‘Sooner or later everything arrives in this life, even that which we don’t want to..’
When Gabriela confronts he mother about the delays to her wedding and tells her that it’s poisoning her life, Gabriela responds with: What do you know of a poisoned life, a life without hope without promise, what know you of bitterness and pain’. And the daughter responds with ,’You don’t’ know what it’s like to love someone as I love Arturo’. But, of course, she does. She goes to church to pray for guidance, ‘Don’t let me arrive at desperation, destroy this fire that consumes me.’ She decides to do the right thing and tells Arturo he must marry her daughter. ‘My daughter is once more my daughter; I can look her in the eye).
Arturo, however, doesn’t feel the same way. He pretends he’s ill with fever, and on a rainy night when something needs to be fetched, he lets his intended go via a bridge that he knows is faulty and will collapse, which is what happens. After her daughter’s burial, people start shunning her at church, she begins to lose employees who now don’t want to work for her. She thinks it’s abut gossip regarding her affair with Arturo. When her old Nana tells her there are whisperings all over town, she doesn’t let her speak, saying only ‘You too have come to judge me?’ A priest in Church appears to announce that ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’. But then, as she’s meeting with potential buyers for that rich land she herself can no longer get anyone to work, she finds out the truth, and tells them ‘we have the duty to repair that which needs repairing’ referring not to the un-mended bridge that killed her daughter but to Arturo. He returns just as she’s reading his love letters to her. The villagers have found he’s back, know the truth and are out to lynch him. But, in a great ending, framed at the beginning by an icon of virgin and child (see clip below), she asks him to close the door of the hacienda, takes out a gun and kills him herself. The last line in the movie is ‘The justice of God has been done in this house; now let the justice of men be done’. To have sex with your daughter’s fiancée is bad enough but she draws the line at murder.
Vértigo is another of those María Felix films that seems relatively unskilled but remains riveting. And not only for her presence. Whilst watching it, I was trying to think of why this film, so choppy and clichéd, a trite melodrama in which one sees the plot coming a mile away, nonetheless retains its power. Sometimes it shows things so outrageous one bursts out in laughter (the waterfall sequence). Then, one imagines what an audience in the mid 40s trying to make sense of the meaning of one’s life and actions through the film might get out of it, and one sees the film slightly differently.
Cheap as the film is, and short as it is (about 1h10mins) it’s a total morality tale about what is right and wrong, about knowing that and still not adhering to social convention because one’s desires don’t always fit into the socially prescribed box, about understanding and forgiving that; about drawing lines between different kinds of transgressions (desire vs. murder); about the difference between law and justice; about what community can and can’t offer and how variable each of those offerings might be over time. In other words these films deal with issues that continue to matter to people and in which the filmmakers find a form through which to directly communication with their audience. It’s its own form of achievement.
A very young María Felix plays a mother of a full grown daughter much earlier than her Hollywood counterparts; She’s the mistress of transgression not only in her films but extra-diagetically. In fact Emilio G. Riera, according to Paco Ignacio Taibo in Maria Felix: 47 pasos por el cine, ‘expressed a general sentiment with an amusing phrase: Here melodrama finds a new sub-genre; that dedicated to showing how María Félix’s beauty is in fact a calamity foisted onto the human species’ (Taibo, p.80).
José Arroyo
María Felix is Diana de Arellano, a man-eater, an adventuress, a bad woman, voracious for sex, jewels and money; and without feeling. She’s going to marry Don Adolfo Gil (Julio Villarreal) because he’s rich. It’s a plus that he’s old and with a heart condition: he won’t last long. Whilst she’s stringing the old guy along, she can’t quite get rid of the young kid she’s also seeing, Pablo (Felipe de Alba).
When her maid asks her to choose, she tells her she won’t let go of either; she wants the young one, and the old one is convenient. She’s so untroubled by her plan that, on the eve of her wedding she remains blissfully asleep, surrounded by silk and satin. Her maid has trouble waking her up but is so devoted, she takes the grapes and lovingly feeds her as she dreams, an opportunity to photograph Felix looking glamorous and sensuous (see clip below), and a camp moment to rival Mae West’s ‘Eulah, peel me a grape.’
It’s only when the maid informs her all her new wedding purchases have arrived that she gets excited and out of bed. But just as she’s about to look at her wedding dress, Pablo comes and threatens her with a gun. She dares him to kill her and he ends up shooting himself. If he’d been a man rather than a kid, she’d have killed her instead of himself, she later says. She calls her fiancée and asks him to bring a doctor, Miguel de Uribe (Luis Aldás), who turns out to be his nephew. She’s so bad that even as they wait for help, and with the corpse next to her not yet cold, she can’t help imagining how beautiful she’s going to look once she puts on all her lovely new things.
They’ve got to get the body out of his flat without anyone seeing them but first they go to a nightclub to show themselves in public. The song they hear is Agustin Lara’s great ‘Aventurera,’ sung by Salvador García
‘Vende caro tú amor,
aventurera
Da el precio del dolor,
a tú pasado
aquel, que de tus labios,
la miel quiera
Que pague con diamantes su pecado
Que pague con diamantes su pecado
Sell expensively your love,
Adventuress
Give the price of your pain
To your past
He who wants the honey of your lips
Must pay your sin with diamonds
Must pay your sin with diamonds.
Miguel keeps looking at Diana, telling us and her, that he knows the truth about her and that truth is being sung to us now. She sees him looking at her massive diamond engagement ring and knows exactly what he’s thinking of her (see clip above). When they return, Maria and the nephew get rid of the corpse in the outskirts of town but he’s lost his hat. Whilst he goes out to search for it, she drives off, leaving him to walk alone through the city where he might be seen. When he returns, she tells him the reason for leaving him was she couldn’t trust herself with him. They make love and she offers to keep on seeing him on the side whilst she marries his uncle. She needs luxury, comfort, lots of money (see clip below).
The nephew’s aghast at what a bad woman she is and goes to confess to his uncle. In the meantime, she calls her fiancée and tells him that the nephew made a pass, is drunk, and besotted with her. The fiancée confronts the nephew but his heart begins to act up in the middle of the confrontation and the nephew decides to lie in order to save the uncle’s life. Miguel also tries to give himself up but the police, rightly thinking he’s trying to impede the wedding, tell him they’ll follow up on the investigation in due time. Miguel thus goes to kill Diana, who, beautiful and already in her wedding gown, dares him to. But Miguel is not a kid like Pablo. He shoots and kills just as the police arrive to question Diana. The film ends with a pan across Diana’s luxurious apartment which rests on her face as the notes to ‘Aventurera’, previously heard in the nightclub scene, play over the last shot
A poorly made film, a male fantasy, a representation of female power in which the protagonist uses all the stupid clichés believed of women by a certain type of man to trick them into doing her bidding. Heartless, selfish, using men only to further her true love, the finer and more expensive things in life, María Félix is beautiful and magnetic. The whole film is so excessive it’s camp. Yet, one can also easily understand from this trashy, lurid film why Félix was an object of veneration; why hers is such a powerful star persona; in fact it’s one of the key films that cemented it. She’s a beautiful woman who dares what others won’t: living out the audience’s fantasies in silk sheets and satin pillows. Why can’t one have sex AND money. Why should she have to pay with her life over a young fool that shot himself for love? For the rest of her career, the man-eating femme fatale would be the first thing one thought of when her name was brought up. This was one of the key films that, for better and worse, cemented that view. Very bad and hugely entertaining.
José Arroyo
A film sold under many names and not a real success under any of them. A Gothic melodrama from Italy. María Félix is the beautiful Oliva, from a well-to-do family. Her widowed mother has chosen an aristocrat for her to marry, old, ugly and very rich. But on the annual feast day in which women are allowed to choose who they dance with, thus announcing their intended, she goes for Pietro (Rossano Brazzi), the King of the pickaxe, a well to do tenant farmer, who dreams of finding a way to bring to life the dry and rocky hills around his land. ‘Will you know how to forgive me,’ she asks him on their wedding day. The film will tell us at the end.
When Pietro takes Oliva to his grandmother to get her blessing for their wedding, she judges Oliva, pretty …but too pretty. On the night that Pietro’s father Bastiano (Charles Vanel) returns from the jewellers, where he’s gone to get Oliva her wedding pearls, thunder and lighting waylay him into a deserted castle (see clip above). The thunder opens up the earth and he there finds a disused Roman temple, full of cobwebs, with mice running around, and in a tomb he finds a legendary treasure, ‘Il Tesoro dei Guarcialupi’ . He goes to his mother for advice and she tells him that gold calls to gold, it’s the demon’s opera. One of the jewels has an image of a beautiful woman, it’s a cursed image, and he must go immediately to the Chapel on the Mount and offer all of it to the Virgin so that she may protect him and his family from the curse. But Bastiano is greedy and doesn’t listen. The rest of the film is precisely about the unfolding of that curse.
Félix once more plays a woman who destroys everything she comes into contact with. Rosanno Brazzi, often so dull, here at least looks soulful and handsome. Charles Vanel is hard, menacing, sober – completely great – as the father who thinks his son is out to assassinate him and kills him first. The film is beautifully shot by Piero Portalupi, immaculately lit, and with some interesting imagery. But it never quite comes to life. The Gothic elements are well imaged (see clips above but also image below) and there’s an interesting dream sequence (see clip immediately above) which also announces the beginning of the curse taking action. But the film creates little tension or suspense. Massimo Serato is Berto, Pietro’s brother and also in love with Olivia, It’s a well-made film but rather lifeless and much less enjoyable than mediocre films from the height of her Mexican period like La Devoradora which are made with less skill but imbued with a pulp, lurid life that makes them great fun to watch.
José Arroyo
A lively debate on BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee’s comic drama based on the true story of Ron Stallworth, a black police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. With limited time, we dig right in. We discuss the film’s point of view on culture and cinema; John David Washington’s performance, the influences we can see in it, and whether a more charismatic star might have made the film even more powerful; our attitudes to Lee’s pamphleteering and the pros and cons of propagandistic cinema; the film’s direct address of Trump’s America and its tragic, somewhat surprising ending; and more.
We question whether the film’s comic treatment of David Duke, head of the KKK, carefully undercuts our delight in mocking him or dangerously indulges it. Duke is rendered a figure of fun in some notable and hilarious scenes, but the film ensures we recognise that he has never gone away. And Mike is particularly affected by Adam Driver’s character, a Jew in name only who, through being threatened by the KKK and confronted by Ron, is forced to reckon with his identity and the fact that it’s been easy for him to ignore it for most of his life. (The Howard Jacobson article he references is linked here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/07/howard-jacobson-jews-know-what-antisemitism-is-and-what-it-isnt-to-invent-it-would-be-a-sacrilege)
As we acknowledge in the podcast, we unfortunately missed the first few minutes of the film, which is only one reason we want to see it again. Mike is bursting with thoughts and can’t get them all out; Jose vacillates on the film’s artistic value, though not its cultural value. There’s much, much more to consider in BlacKkKlansman than we were able to in this podcast and we shall return to it.
The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.
With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.
It’s been out for four weeks and finally we decide to grapple with Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. Mike has just recently caught up with the first film, a jukebox musical that José disliked, and both are disappointed with the sequel’s lack of skill or even instinct as to what makes a musical actually work. Mike points out some elements of story structure he found original, and Jose is impressed with how the film juggles its vast cast of characters, but they disagree on Cher. (Spoiler: José really loves Cher.)
Neither comes away really having enjoyed the film, though neither is really the target audience either. But there’s fun to be had in critiquing it!
The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.
With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.
There’s a lot to remark upon in The Darkest Minds. It’s a story of a society broken down by fear of children and a group of young survivors negotiating their own development and making their way towards liberation. It is representationally interesting, the central character a young black girl through whose eyes the film is filtered.
Depictions of children being rounded up into concentration camps disturbingly echoes the actions of ICE under the Trump administration, not to mention countless other examples of segregation and incarceration of peoples throughout history. The central theme of a young woman making herself invisible in order to satisfy others and smooth her path through life is worked through intelligently and tragically.
It’s visually uninspiring, and lacks charm and flair, but The Darkest Minds is an interesting and heartfelt teen movie for an increasingly enlightened young audience.
The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.
With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.
A young and sexy Yves Montand and the ever beautiful María Félix in Les Héros sont fatigués/ Heroes and Sinners (see below). As you can see from the posters above, the filmmakers hoped the sex would sell the film’s more complicated themes of de-colonisation in Africa, German unification, European conciliation, and what happens to men after the struggles they sacrificed their lives to are ended. A melodrama/adventure film/ political statement that does not quite fully work but that is so fascinating I plan to watch it again. María Felix is introduced being pushed around by her partner, a former collaborator and anti-semite, for sleeping with black men. Curd Jürgens won the best actor prize for his performance at the Venice Film Festival that year for this film. Gert Fröbe is at least as good as a concentration camp survivor.
Frantz Fanon would publish Black Skins, White Masks in 1952; Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man also came out in ’52; Aimé Césaire Discours sur le colonialism in ’55; Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in ’58. This film is made amidst ideas on race and colonialism that were live in that period, by filmmakers who were actively engaged, who contributed to the development and dissemination of political and aesthetic ideas, from the left, in the public sphere of post-war France.
Director Yves Ciampi had made a famous film on the Liberation of Paris, Les compagnons de la gloire — La division Leclerc dans la bataille, headed the Film Technicians Trade Union, and would go on to marry Japanese actress Keiko Kishi. One of the writers, Jacques-Laurent Bost, might be more famous to cinéastes today as the brother of Pierre Bost, the screnwriter François Truffaut singled out for his ire in ‘Une certain tendance du cinéma Francais’. But those more familiar with French culture would know him as the war correspondent hired by Albert Camus to cover the fall of Berlin. He was at the liberation of Dachau and was one of the first people to write about the Holocaust. He was also, along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, a founding member of Le nouvel observateur, a key member of that particular group of existentialists and the lover of Simone de Beauvoir. Montand was for most of his life a life-long leftist, closely associated with the communist party, and his brother Julien Livi was a member of the Communist party, one of the leading post-war Trade Unionists and Genera Secretary to the ‘Fédération du Commerce, des Services de de la Distribtuion (CGT) de l’alimentation’ from 1956 to 1979. Even María Félix, who seemed to skate elegantly over politics and had seemingly had no qualms about working in Fascist Spain or Peron’s Argentina just a few years earlier, was then involved with Jean Cau, Sartre’s former secretary and a writer who’d published Maria-Nêgre, a novel about the tragic love affair between a black GI and an Italian girl set during the libertion of Naples and published in 48.
The filmmakers lean left, most of them with personal experience of racism, and perhaps because of that the film engages with and dramatises issues of racial relations in a post-colonial setting with a seriousness and relative depth that is rare in cinema, particularly the cinema of that period. As the title card that precedes the film (above) tells us: ‘This film is set in in one of the black republics of Africa. In these republics, young and independent, a black elite educated abroad has introduced a language and way of life far removed from African morays. In spite of that, these countries have preserved most of their ancestral traditions.’
Les heros sont fatigués is ostensibly an adventure story about a former flier now stuck piloting merchandise across Africa, who gets his hands on a shipment of diamonds, and decides that selling them for himself might be his ticket back home. But the colonial structures and relationships of this former British colony keep getting in the way. In the first few minutes of the film, Michel Riviére (Montand) hitches a ride to Free City, the capital, stops off at the house of the only contact he has and this is what we’re shown (see clip below): the camera follows him into the house, what we hear is American blues, one of the young women working is topless, the young child is naked, there’s a rooster on top of the fridge. It all looks ‘pittoresque,’ othered, overly atmospheric, and arguably racist in the way it fails to distinguish between black American and African cultures. But then, listen to the head of the household’s speech. ‘He was nothing more than a thief…We have no need of your kind here. Our country is young and we are free. Can’t you understand?’ Visually and aurally the film gives mixed signals. But there’s no misinterpreting the speech, one that frames the rest of the film just as powerfully as the text before the film’s beginning excerpted above.
María Félix gets a great introduction — her transgression here is that she has a black lover, Sidney (Gordon Heath), and without hiding it from her partner either. But the scene illustrates why in order to understand the power and force of María Félix’s stardom, one has to see her in her Mexican films. There she’s presented as a force of nature, a beauty both indigenous and rare with a touch of the divine and more than soupçon of devilry. She’s ‘Woman’ in all her many guises and everything happens around her. Here, she’s the illustration of a theme.
As you can see in the clip below, we see her through Montand’s look. He goes to the door, moves towards the window and spies on François (Jean Severin) screaming at Manuella ‘You’re white. You belong to us’. ‘Shut up stupid’. The fight continues in voice-over but the camera follows Montand as he now goes into the bar and asks if they have a room. ‘If she lets herself be touched by her Negro, I’ll shoot her and him with her.’ Then note how everyone’s gaze turns to Montand, François moves to occupy the space between Manuela and Michel. And then in the next shot, she moves in between the two men, foreshadowing what is inevitable, ie, the two stars of the film start a love affair, as François says, ‘She’s sleeping with black men. Can you imagine? Her!’ And then another character, who we will learn is a Republican ex-combattant from the Spanish Civil War, intervenes and says of François. ‘He’s got a good stomach. In France he ate jews; here it’s Blacks’, thus linking them together in the film’s thematisation of race. I wanted to draw attention to this because it’s Félix’s introduction; and in many ways it’s very powerful. But the focus is almost entirely on Montand or on the question of miscegenation and racism. She barely gets a word or a look in.
The themes of colonisation in its changing forms is shown in different ways. At the very beginning as Michel enters free city, we see a big billboard advertising Coca Cola (see frame grab, below left). Later on when Sidney (Gordon Heath) enters the bar to propose marriage to Manuella and François reaches for the gun, its symbolically shown to us as surrounded by American dollars (see frame grab, below left). One empire has left but another is taking over with a different form of colonisation but just as murderous. One of the characters says ‘there’s only two white women here and they’re both colonised by blacks.’ But that’s missing the point, which is that one master is giving way to another, and that Coca Cola can serve one empire just as military presence did a previous model.
Like in Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear — Montand’s first big hit in the movies — much of the narrative here revolves around a bar in which series of outcasts stuck in a third-world country pass the time and scheme on how to get out. But Les héros sont fatiguées is more overtly political: François Severin (Jean Servais) is the collaborationist judge who helped send Jews to the gas chambers; Hermann (Gert Fröbe) is a former German politician sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis for his politics, now stuck repairing watches in Africa; there’s also more than a hint that Pépé (Manolo Montez) fought on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War (see the posters around his bed, bottom left); and of course Wolf Gerke (Curd Jürgens) Michel’s equal and opposite, is revealed to be a former Luftwaffe flyer (see the image of the lighter, below right), who fought on the opposite side.
The film offers a conciliation between Hermann and Wolf, they both dream of German re-unification. And the last image in the film will be that of Wolf and Michel supporting each other as they make their way out of the country and into a new life as partners (see below).
I was very intrigued by the scene below, as structurally and thematically complex one. In the scenes at the bar Michel and Wolf have a deal going but Michel is hoping to double-cross him by escaping on a boat. Wolf and Hermann, previously poles apart in politics, use Christmas as an occasion in which to offer a toast for peace and for German unification. It’s also where Manuella has to tell Michel that François has sabotaged their escape plans and hopes to find another solution by visiting Sidney, her black lover and a powerful person in the country’s new order. It’s a bit after this that Michel and Wolf will realise their commonality in spite of having fought against each other in the war and bond.
The scene cross-cuts between the bar inside, the populace at large celebrating in their own indigenous customs; and the Europeanised hoi polloi adopting foreign customs in dress and dancing. It’s the last bit, where Manuella goes into the haute-bourgeois black party that intrigues me, partly because it must have been so rare to see in the cinema in 1955. Here the tables are turned. Manuella, who started off life as a Consul’s daughter, is here looked upon as the outsider, slightly trashy, out of place and possibly not knowing her place. It’s where Sidney throws Manuella physically out of the party and Villeterre (Gérard Oury), the fixer who’s arranged to buy Michel’s diamonds at a fixed price, tells Sidney, ‘Come on, come on my friend. Make a gesture. Be jealous, by all means. But don’t be racist.’ How are we meant to look at this scene? Are we meant to be with Sidney and the black bourgeoisie?; are we meant to look down on them?; are we meant to think they’re gotten too big for their britches, have forgotten to be African and badly imitating a culture that doesn’t suit them? I’m not sure. Yves Ciampi is not a good enough director to be both clear and complex in his filming of the scene. But for me this is the scene the film is worth seeing for.
There are other attractions of course, Maria Felix exhibiting a degree of flesh that must have been shocking then. She’s constrained by being limited to only one outfit but she does what she can for her fans by making her hair do the work expected of stars (see below right). Montand is very sexy also. Curd Jürgens and Gert Fröbe are excellent. The score, featuring some of the biggest hits of the era (Edith Piaf et) is a delight. The fim’s aims and its politics are admirable. But it’s well filmed without being exciting (The Wages of Fear is a useful contrast here as well). It’s also a bit muddled in that it loses the action/adventure strand of the film in its attempt to include the politics and the picturesque. And yet, without being great, it’s interested me enough to write 2,000 words on it.
José Arroyo
Designed entirely to simulate the desktop interface of a Macbook, Unfriended: Dark Web enthusiastically adapts modern fears of surveillance and digital stalking to the horror genre (drawing on the style of 2014’s Unfriended, to which this is a sequel). It’s a stylistic achievement that never once feels unconvincing, even if the route the plot takes is far from unpredictable.
We discuss the way the film hides its most graphic elements and is able to create tension and horror from the very opposite, and the wonderful evocation of distracted attention, with the main character jumping between Skype, Spotify, Facebook and more, that remarkably never becomes overwhelming or incomprehensible. Some of the performances aren’t the best, and we each found the film uninvolving at different points and for different reasons, but generally speaking we enjoyed the film’s experiment and found it interesting.
We also discuss the two producers, each of whose names caught our eyes, and how Dark Web fits in to the current cinema programme.
The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.
With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.
In La Violetera (Luis Cesar Amadori, 1958) Sara Montiel’s rich aristocratic lover (Ralf Vallone) leaves her when after the death of his brother he inherits lands and title, must protect the family name, and can no longer afford to be seen with a lowly seller of violets/ music hall singer. She runs off and of course ends up triumphing in all the great capitals of Europe. The film offers a montage of her singing different songs across different capitals and in Paris the song she offers is ‘Mon homme’, which she begins singing in Spanish and then switches to French to flatter her audience.
Watching her sing the song made me wonder if there is an international repertoire that gay divas have in common. The song was introduced by Mistinguette in 1920. Arletty, the glorious gay diva who, after being tried as a collaborator for having a Nazi lover during the occupation famously retorted, ‘My heart is French but my ass is international,’ also covered it. The song is basically sets to music the indelible character in Marcel Carné’s Hôtél du Nord minus the ‘atmosphere, atmosphere!’: ‘on the ground we argue, she says in the film, but in bed we communicate, and on the pillow we understand each other’ (see excerpt below):
If you understand French, it’s worth listening to the two French versions side by side.
The song was made famous in America by Fanny Brice in 1921 and was such a hit she even starred in a film by that name in 1928. It was famously revived for Funny Girl by Gay Diva extraordinaire Barbra Streisand below. Again it’s worth comparing Brice’s version to Streisand’s (below):
Another such comparison is that of the Billie Holiday and Diana Ross versions. Diana, or Miss Ross to you, had famously played Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues. And Holiday’s great version of the song, had been a big hit in the thirties without quite eclipsing Brice’s version in the culture at large. It’s again instructive to look at these two versions together. Ross looks completely glam, interacts with the audience, says how hard the song is for her to sing. She takes the audience through the mechanics of the song. Her voice is unique, instantly recognisable, one of the great glories of American pop. But I don’t believe a word she says; and neither does she. ‘I hate that line’ she says after singing ‘He Beats Me too’. Compare it to Holiday’s version below. It brings up all kinds of feelings, confused and contradictory ones, about a person and a way of life that can’t be contained by camp. The hurt bursts through.
Now let me take you to what started this off in the first place, Sara Montiel’s version. As you can see below, if it was difficult to believe what Ross was singing in the clip from Vegas above. Montiel doesn’t even try to communicate what the song is saying. Her number is so far removed from what Billie Holiday is conveying that it’s as if from a parallel universe. With Montiel, it’s all about the dress, the hairstyle, the gestures; it’s all about her; and about inciting audience adoration. It’s all artifice, exaggeration, style, decorative beauty. Camp. ‘My job is not to be a good singer or a good dancer or a good actress. My job is to be a star’. And as you can see, the clip below puts you in no doubt of that fact. There’s nothing there about a woman who loves a man so she’s willing to share him, or get beaten up by him. He wouldn’t dare. That downtrodden woman in the song is transformed into an object of admiration and worship. She glistens, she beckons, she offers looks. It has nothing to do with the truth of the song. Montiel transcends hurt and oppression with gorgeous gowns and glamour. Glitter eclipses hurt.
José Arroyo
There were so many rats in the hovel Marucha (Sara Montiel) grew up in that they chewed off half her face. Being ugly means she’s the victim of men’s callousness. This has made her embittered and turned her into a gangster’s moll. She’s got a lovely figure though and can still shake a living from singing in cabaret by wearing a Veronica Lake peekaboo hairstyle that hides her disfigurement.
This works most of the time. But occasionally blokes in the audience clock the chewed-up face, make nasty catcalls, taunt her, laugh at he until she collapses from the stress of it all. This happens one night when a plastic surgeon’s in the club. Dr. Carlos Alonso (Manolo Fábregas) takes her on as a client hoping that a lovely face will help her develop a lovely soul. But once she sees how the Doctor’s transformed her into …well…Sara Montiel, its nertz to that. She becomes ‘Piel Canela/Cinnamon Skin’, a successful cabaret singer and very expensive prostitute who’s out to get her revenge on men.
The Doctor becomes besotted with her but she couldn’t live in his world she tells him, and he wouldn’t know how to live in hers. All the surgery’s signified is that she’s moved from a world of cheap vices to a world of expensive ones. But soon they fall for each other. And just as quickly, her past catches up with her. Julio (Ramon Gáy), the head of the gang Marucha used to run around with and a bit of an old flame, forces the Doctor to operate on him and change aliases. The Doctor has no choice but is disgusted with Marucha for tricking him into a situation he finds dishonourable and illegal. Months later, he turns himself over to the police. To redeem herself for having sunk the Doctor’s career, Marucha goes in search of her gangnster ex. He’s got a new face but she recognises the origami he’s in the habit of making with bits of paper, tricks him into admitting his previous crimes to the police and as a result the Doctor is shown to be innocent and cleared of his. She gets shot in the crossfire. They put her on the operating table again but this time it’s too late and the distraught Doctor can do nothing. Prayer, and the nurse who’s quietly had the hots for him all along will be his only consolation.
This is hackneyed material, much better executed with more means by Gustaf Molander (1938)and George Cukor (1941) in the two versions of A Woman’s Face. And Bergman and Crawford are certainly better in the part than Montiel is here. Everything about this film is strictly B. That said, Montiel is really the main reasons to see this film. It’s one of the 14 she did in four years in Mexico. It was a huge success in Mexico, partly due to Montiel, partly due to the famous and eponymous bolero. Though it’s not Montiel who gets to sing the famous song, she does get to sing three other songs in the film, and her relative success in doing so would pave the way for extraordinary run of hit musical melodramas in Spain from ’57 onwards as well as her extraordinary recording career.
As a side note, this is also one of three films she made in this period shot in Cuba and with Havana as a location. For those of you, like I, who love Havana and might have reveries about what it was like in the early 50s, the film is a special thrill (see below). Even the Cine Yara appears in back projection.
José Arroyo
Big shark, big Cockney, big fun. We dive into The Meg, a film we can all agree should have been called Chomp. It’s definitely trashy, though precisely how trashy is an area of disagreement. For José, it’s a bad movie. For Mike, it’s a good bad movie.
The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.
With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.
A great Mexican noir from director Roberto Gavaldón. Pedro Armendáriz, earlier in his career the pretty and poetic peasant of Emilio Fernández’ Flor Silvestre (1943) and María Candelaria (1944), the enraptured revolutionary of Enamorada (1946), so often the embodiment of the best of Mexican masculinity, here represents the worst. His Marcos Arizmendi, jai alai champ and national celebrity, is arrogant, selfish, conceited, eager to raise his fists and happy to give a good kicking to any old stray dog that gets in his way: ‘A man who doesn’t triumph doesn’t deserve to live,’ he says.
He’s got three women on the go: Lucrecia (Eva Martino) is his main squeeze, and as the song she sings in the nightclub tells us (see below), she’s so crazy for him, she accepts his cheating on her with other women because, as he tells her, having a fifth of a first rate man is worth than getting the whole of a fifth rate one. He’s also reconnecting with a former flame, Sara (Anita Blanch). He squeezed her out all her personal fortune years go in Manila. But now her husband’s dead, and as soon as she tells him she’s inherited, his interest in reviving their old affair increases exponentially. He’s also been screwing around with Rebeca (Rebeca Villareal), a timid, underage, girl from a respectable family who he’s gotten pregnant.
It’s how Marcos attempts to run away from his responsibilities towards Rebeca that seals his doom. Marcos is already familiar with betting. Gavaldón depicts that world, not unlike the American boxing films of the period, as one intimately connected with the underworld. But so far, Marcos’ movements through the night have been in nightclubs, hotels, bars, places for drinking, smokin, sex; he’s been around criminality but not connected to it. His trying to trick his pregnant and underage girlfriend out of marriage changes everything. A gangster uses the threat of making this public to blackmail him into throwing the game. Rebeca’s brother double-crosses both by telling him he doesn’t need to, thus setting the gangsters on his trail, plunging him further into a world of fedoras, guns, moonlight reflections on dark canals were bodies get thrown.
Gavaldón and cinematographer Jack Draper film all of this beautifully. We often see people through bars, nets, even the nightclub seems encased in a spider’s web (see below). The film’s locations are archetypally noir, nightclubs, betting in arenas, hotels (see below, second row); and so is the imagery (see third and fourth row).
The script is credited to Luis Spota. But José Revueltas, for many years a communist revolutionary and political activist, worked on the adaptation, which might account for the film’s unusual critique of the middle and upper classes in the film and of those who, like Marcos, attempt to move through their ranks.
The film also offers an opportunity to see Mexico City as it was at night in the 1950, an urban view, a rare one, of Mexico’s capital, and the sight of many landmarks will bring pleasure to those who know the city.
José Arroyo
From the very beginning of La Diosa arrodillada, the viewer is plunged into a heightened world of dreams and desires, a world of feeling which the characters express through diaries, letters. They speak to each other in a heightened tone, with poetic language and presented to the viewer through symbolic use of imagery. The films is, to borrow J. Hoberman’s words, ‘part film noir, part grand opera’.
La Diosa arrodillada opens with Raquel (María Félix) eagerly awaiting her lover Antonio (Arturo de Córdova) at the airport. She smiles with pleasure at his arrival, and before he sees her, thus conveying to us that her feelings for him are real. In the first few lines of dialogue, we know they’ve done this before, that their time together is fleeting and precious, snatched from other commitments and obligations. There’s then a dissolve. We first see a carafe of wine, smoke curling up the frame. We hear her voice, ‘to think I never ask you anything. I’ve never wanted to ask you anything’. The camera pulls back. ‘That’s the proof of our love’, he responds, ‘We must never interrogate the past if we value our love’.
‘But it’s so difficult to be strong when alone’, she says, ‘and we see so little of each other. Let’s never abandon each other. It would be like death.’
‘If so, let’s close our eyes and live that dream’.
Cut to an extraordinary close-up of Félix, as if in orgasm, saying: ‘I’ll keep my eyes closed to prevent my soul from escaping this dream. That is my promise Antonio’.
From the beginning we’re plunged into a world of feeling, dreams, a place where life is to be lived in the intense now without regard to the past and bracketed away from the future and from the society that intrudes on this world of feeling and may shatter it . But these wishes won’t come true; the promises won’t be kept. The world will intrude. They try to do what they think is right but are propelled by a force of desire they can’t control; he especially as despite the film’s title, this is not the story of a kneeling Goddess but of a fallen man.
Desire
What drives the narrative engine of The Kneeling Goddess, the motor of all noir, is desire. In this case, Antonio’s for Raquel. The film tells us this most directly. When he returns home to his office and his wife, Antonio looks outside, to a sign urging lovers to ‘Use Desire, the Perfume of Lovers’. The film doesn’t want us to miss this so the score urgently and loudly underlines its significance.
‘What do you understand by desire,’ Antonio asks his butler? ‘what one longs for, what one wants..’. ‘Exactly. But it’s more than that. It’s a force that obliges you. That propels you to obtain what you want, and to keep it if you’ve already obtained it. Isn’t that right?’
‘Yes’
‘But that force can grow, take shape, take on a life of its own, become stronger than you, and could end up destroying you. And what’s worse destroy all those closest to you.’
Antonio looks of a picture of his wife, who’s been in ill in a sanatorium in Cincinnati, probably the reason he hooked up with Racquel in the first place. It’s at that moment that Antonio decides to stop seeing Raquel. Raquel, however, has beat him to it, leaving a letter for him, saying she’s got a past, one she doesn’t want to divulge to him, and in spite of her promises, can’t continue seeing him. He never gets that letter because, reminded of how much he loves his wife and how much his wife needs him, he ends up not going to Guadalajara to see her and thus does not receive her brush-off.
But fate won’t let them be. When he returns home, his wife has been completing work on the garden. They’ve put a fountain. And she decides that the only thing missing, is a statue, something like the Venus de Milo. He goes to a gallery and finds the statue he’s looking for, a statue clearly modelled on Raquel, who he finds there, half-dressed after having posed for the sculptorp. It’s called ‘The Kneeling Goddess’, she informs him, ‘but it’s really just a woman on her knees, the way men like to see them be.’
In the clip below, you can see, how Gavaldón shows us the effect of that statue, of Raquel, on Antonio and his marriage. He becomes transfixed. His wife watches the statue take hold of him. There’s thunder, lightning, rain. Like Sirk, Gavaldón is not afraid to externalise feeling. But unlike Sirk, Gavaldón does not ironise, distance, or make strange. The obsession depicted comes from the heart and is meant to be understood as such. When he returns to his study, we hear him tell himself in voice-over:’ there’s nothing worse than fooling yourself. All my struggle has been for nought. I understand it’s stronger than I’. Reason and will recede, and he succumbs to desire and the unconscious.
Thus begins Antonio’s decline. Once he was a happily married man, a rich industrialist with his own chemical company. Soon he’ll be chasing through the tropics following a cabaret singer selling more than songs in cheap dives. His wife is surrounded by friends, chandeliers, formal paintings of herself, she plays classical music. Raquel in contrast is shown naked in marble, showing off her body in Panama’s Paradise singing popular song and embracing unknown sailors. The film is not afraid of over-emphasis and the contrasting ways in which each woman in Antonio’s life is symbolised is consistently and continually underlined.
Time is a persistent theme in the film. At the beginning, Raquel wants to deny the past and the future and live in a continual present. They have little time. Later on, Antonio’s wife dies. In an extraordinary scene, Gavaldón shows us the married couple, the wedding cake celebrating their anniversary in the foreground, the statue that threatens the marriage behind them in the background. In seconds, Antonio will put poison in a drink. His wife will see him put that poison in one of two drinks. Is the poison for her or for himself? We don’t know but in the next shot an obit shows us the wife’s already a goner.
Raquel believes he may have done it out of love for her. This rather thrills her. It might be what made him go to Panama, to get drunk watching her sing of the treachery and uselessness of love and marriage and allowing herself, like Gilda, to be felt up by the men in the audience. When she asks him why he’s followed her to Panama, he, drunk on the floor with alcohol, and drunk in the head with desire for her, cups her breasts and then moves his hand up her throat and tries to strangle her. Time as feeling in the film stands still; time as narrative gallops along at an insatiable pace.
The question of time is uttered constantly in stylised language and shown to us through a symbol that encapsulates so many of the film’s themes. A lighter (see below), that is also a watch, and that has a secret compartment which can carry poison. Thus, a desire that sparks, that will burn, with an intensity that can only ever be delimited before it is extinguished, and that carries a poison through which one can kill oneself and possibly others. All encased in time. It’s brilliant.
Like in a musical, the songs in the Panama Paradise sequence are used to comment on the story. The first part of the number, starts with Raquel partner’s singing to us: ‘I just screwed up, I got married, and fell into the woman’s trap’. She in turn begins her song by saying how women have to act submissive and be smart to catch a man. ‘I confess I don’t know what love is’ ‘You have a heart of crystal,’ sings her partner.
Then the tone changes and Raquel goes onto perform her solo which begins in the talk-singing style later made famous by Rex Harrison and which begins the clip above. ‘I’ve known love. It’s very beautiful. Burt for me it was fleeting and traitorous. It made dishonest what was once glorious. My law is pleasure…for money,’ and then she begins the song proper. Love was her cross and her religion but love’s revenge was marriage, after which their love became only pretend, a farce they’re now condemned to keep on repeating.
The last bit of the number, a duet once more, sings of the glories of not getting married and that to be happy one must never listen to one’s heart and forget about love. Something that Antonio, in the audience, and having drunk his way to unconsciousness due to his feelings for her, is beginning to learn. But as the song ends, a coochie dancer appears, shakes her bum, and lets the audience in the scene and the audience watching the film know love’s got little to do with anything: that it’s all about the sex.
David Melville notes the comparison to Von Sternberg in this sequence: ‘This whole nightclub episode builds to a fetishist frenzy that’s worthy of Josef von Sternberg. María’s sleazy manager and co-star (Fortunio Bonanova) scrawls a message in lipstick on her dressing room mirror (Morocco). It’s New Year’s Eve, and the air shimmers with balloons and paper streamers (Dishonored). He wears a white tuxedo (Blonde Venus) and she sports a white silk gown decorated with fringe (The Devil Is a Woman). María Félix, to be fair, is far more Maria Montez than Marlene Dietrich – but she throws herself into the melodramatic absurdities with a gusto that many a more gifted actress might envy’.
Raquel only begins to be sure of his love once she suspects he may have killed for her. This paves the way for getting married and the return to Mexico,. As you can see in the fantastic sequence above, the film turns quasi-Gothic, like a combination of Rebecca and Suspicion. She wears black, wonders around the house at night, finds his bedroom locked to her. She sees that the portrait of Antonio’s dead wife dominates the living room, that her reminder is everywhere in the house. He in turn spies her contemplating his dead wife’s painting, which he then becomes obsessed with. This is dark, murky, territory, where the darker feelings that edge and constantly pull on desire — guilt, disgust, fear, jealousy — are symbolically visualised.
The picture of Raquel that drives Antonio so wild with desire, The Kneeling Goddess, is meant to be of Diana, the Goddess of the Hunt. And María Félix is often adorned with feathers, beautiful, but a bird of prey (see examples above).
Raquel is also often associated with animals. The Giraffe print in the Schiaparelli-esque dress on the left, the mermaid or siren look in the picture on the second from the left, the spider web dress in the second from the right, and of course in fur on the right.
As Moviediva argues, ‘La diosa tackles one of Gavaldon’s recurring themes, death, in this case the death of a man’s spirit, as he is corrupted by his love for a femme fatale. He loves the use of mirrors, used to demonstrate duality, and here, also the decay of the hero’s morality. Because there was no Production Code in Mexico, this film is surprisingly sexy for a 1940s film’. Indeed as you can see in the images above, whereas the wife was always associated with high culture, refinement and respectability, Raquel is constantly associated with sex, a Circe who will drive men to ridicule and ruin. As J. Hoberman writes, The Kneeling Goddess ‘is the most outré of melodramas, it’s a movie of flagrant symbols, blatant coincidences and astounding scenes …(and María Félix is) a femme fatale to rival any from 1940s Hollywood, Félix embodies a moral ambiguity beyond good and evil.’
Paco Ignacio Taibo has written that when the film came out in Mexico it was denounced as an ‘insult to the morality of the country’, an attack on Christian morality, There were demonstrations. Taibo is particularly harsh on the film’s wardrobe, which as you can see from my comments above, I heartily disagree with; and also with the film’s dialogue: ‘I’ve had to fight very hard to win your heart’; ‘I’ve tried to fight a fire with a sea of dynamite’; ‘You either give yourself to me or destroy me’.
I see the dialogue as one of the film’s strengths. It is like opera, it is meant to ‘sing’ a realm of feeling. External realism has very little place in film’s of this type. Like in many film noirs, melodramatic passion is what’s on visual display; how desire can drive a man to his doom, desire for whom, and how. As we can see in the final sequence, where Raquel runs to the jail to inform her husband that he’s been declared innocent, that the night is gone forever, all whilst images show her and then him and then them, imprisoned by their past, their desires, their actions: the dream they wanted to hold onto by closing their eyes turned into a nightmare, his fears regarding his desires, being proved all too true. And then the film, rather than ending on him ends on her, in the mansion that is now hers, looking at the statue that she posed for, and pondering that power of that which it represents. What is the significance of her look as the camera follows her gaze and tracks into a closer look at the stature? It’s a great sequence in a truly great movie (see below)
José Arroyo
The first Mexican film to be nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, and a truly great movie. Macario (Ignacio López Tarso) is a good, honest, hardworking peasant who lives for his family. He works all day but has so many children that they literally take the food from his plate. Director Roberto Gavaldón is great at showing what hunger feels like, the life of people who live on less than subsistence wages, the melodrama that conveys the truth and pain of the small things in life: .
Macario fears God, is haunted by the dead, and dreams of food. One day he vows that unless he can have something entirely to himself he won’t eat at all . His wife (Pina Pellicer), fearing that he’ll die, steals a turkey, cooks it for him and asks him to eat it out in the fields where the children won’t get to it first and he won’t be interrupted so that he can finally enjoy one thing all to himself. When he sits down to eat his turkey, he’s taunted by the devil, who offers him all kinds of things if he’d share his food with him. But Macario is a good man and refuses. Then God appears and also asks for some of his food. But Macario, figuring that God can have anything he wants, refuses him also. Finally death appears. Macario figuring he’s got no option and that at least he’ll live for as long as it takes death to eat his half of the turkey, agrees to share it.
As a reward, death offers him a vial of water that can bring some people back from the dead. Macario is to be alone with those he wants to cure, death will then appear. If he’s at the foot of the bed, Macario can offer them his water and cure them. If Death’s at the head, nothing can be done for them and they’re goners. Macario’s urged to be careful with this magic water as he will receive no more and when it’s gone Death will be merciless.
Macario is delighted to have escaped death, and with newfound powers. But has he? The rest of the film is a morality tale, a fable about life and death, a commentary on the meanings of Mexico’s day of the dead, the cruelties of Church and government, the petty avarices of little people made big with money.
It’s a beautiful film, rich in symbolism, poetic but directly accessible. It’s got striking, expressionist imagery that is easily understandable in ways that go right to one’s head and heart. It’s a direct influence on the equally great Coco, one of the many reasons to see it.
José Arroyo
Writing on Las cosas del querer in the year 2000 (see reference at end) ….I noted how the film re-imagines and re-images Spain through the ‘figure of the homosexual and through homosexual culture, i.e. what in the film’s narrative is exiled from Spain, the film itself re-constructs and re-inserts into the representation of nation. When Mario (Manuel Bandera) is discharged from jail at the beginning of the film, the warden contemptuously hands him what he sees as his faggotty castanets and tells him, ‘in this Spain of peace there is no place for reds or queers’. But in the Spain of Las cosas, queers are in fact everywhere: cafes, toilets, and aristocratic drawing rooms; on-stage, backstage and, most importantly in the audience. When María Barranco sings that she is delighted to be ‘single for life’, the campy boys in the audience respond in the feminine, ‘nosotras tambien (we are a well)’.
A pivotal moment in Las cosas, one which demonstrates how the film draws on gay culture and the folklore film is the scene below, where Mario (Manuel Bandera) sings, ‘Te lo juro yo (I swear to you)’ to Juan (Ángel de Andrés López). Structurally this is the climax of the film where Mario declares his love for Juan, rejects the Marquis and insults the Marquis’ mother, thus setting in play the mechanisms for the dénoument. We are first shown Mario in long shot. The song begins. Mario, looking intently at Juan in medium close-up, abruptly turns away to face the empty theatre as he begins to sing, ‘Yo no me di cuenta de que te tenía hasta el mismo dia en que te perdi (I didn’t realise I had you until the very first day I lost you)’. Mario sings of his suffering and begs for love. When the lyrics gets to the point that the break-up was all his fault because he slept around, we are shown the Marquis spying on the performance, a clear reference to Mario’s own sexual appetite. However the key moment is when, in close-up, Mario, eyes brimming with tears, turns abruptly back to face Juan and sings the lyrics, declares his love, directly to him ‘mira que te llevo dentro de mi corazón…mira que pa mí en el mundo no hay na mas que tú….por tí contaria la arena del mar, por tí seria capaz de matar (Look, I carry you within my heart..Look, for there is only you…for you I would count the sand in the sea, for you I would be capable of killing)’. Juan squirms with embarrassment but Mario will sing the rest of the song directly to him.
Gay male audiences were avid and knowledgeable consumers of the folklore genre and the films, songs and stars of the genre were, and continue to be, an important part of Spanish camp culture. Jo Labanyi in Screen has written that the ‘early Francoist folklórica has in recent years enjoyed a revival with Spanish gay audiences because of its camp exposure and the evident constructedness of its representation of gender roles. Las cosas not only puts the gay audience back in to the picture diegetically but also addresses gay in the audience through a mode of narration that acknowledges and utilises a camp appreciation of the genre at various levels.
The climax of Las cosas del querer is the declaration of love of one man for another through a song that has rich connotations. Lola Flores famously performed ‘Te lo juro yo’ to Fernando Fernan Gomez in Morena Clara (Luis Lucia, 1954, see clip above). She was the happy-go-lucky gypsy, he the stiff lawyer. Lola is leaving hims because his mother has convinced her that she would damage his career. So she sings him this song as a way of saying goodbye and with an intensity of feeling and a sense of self-abnegation that echoes and begs comparison with Bandera’s more restrained and less skilful performance. But what is also carried through is the memory of Lola Flores and what she signifies both in the folklore film and in gay culture. Leonardo Rojic has rated her as one of the greatest camp icons. Roger D. Tinnell calls her the ‘Queen’ of Spanish music. She was also a mythic star of folklore cinema in the Spain of the 40s and 50s. Román Guber compared these folklore stars to monsters: ‘in times of (economic) depression the cinema converts itself not so much to a factory of dreams as into a factory of nightmares. The Americans invented King King, we invented the folklóricas‘.
It’s a cruel remark, Lola, so famous and beloved she was called Lola of Spain was seen to represent what was best about Spanishness: talent, wit, pluck, energy and of course alegría (gaeity). She embodied this in such an exaggerated way that it became camp. Seeing Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards (Michael Roberts, Netflix, 2017) it was interesting to see Blahnik and John Galliano bonding together through a campy appreciation of Lola Flores (see image above) which demonstrates both their love for her and her continued sub-cultural significance.
What I didn’t know when I wrote the article on Las cosas in the year 2000 is that the song was also performed by Sara Montiel in Varietés (see above). So the use of the song in Las cosas del querer has associations not only with one diva but with two; two stars associated with outsiderness and transgression; two figures central to camp appreciation in Spain from the late forties right through at least the 80s and beyond, two transgressive figures, through which male homosexual audiences in Spain learned particular ways of being gay and a particular gay culture which they could contribute to, participate in, change; and in doing so find an imaginary space through which to construct an identity, a culture and a society in a country in which they were forbidden to; where their very being resulted in censure and punishment.
It’s interesting now to see the same number in Las cosas as a re-presentation of queerness in Spain brought together in a declaration of homosexual love that speaks through a collective memory of a camp appreciation of both Lola Flores and Sara Montiel, processes that Almodóvar dramatises so well in relation to Montiel in La mala educación/ Bad Education.
You can see Almodóvar’s hommage to Flores below:
And here is his hommage to Sara Montiel:
Three versions of the same song across three films from different decades, sung by two gay divas and one homosexual speaks a particular gay culture, its development, change and uses, as is evident in Almodóvar’s appreciation of both.
José Arroyo
References:
José Arroyo, ‘Queering the Folklore: Genre and Re-presentation of Homosexual and National Identities in Las cosas del querer‘, Bill Marshall and Robynn Stilwell (eds), London: Intellect Books, 2000, pp. 70-80. All other references can be found in this article.