The Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles presented Dos tipos de cuidado (1953) at the Palace Theatre in downtown Los Angeles on June 15, as part of the 2016 "Last Remaining Seats" series, organized by the Los Angeles Conservancy.
Below are the program notes I wrote for this very funny Mexican comedy.
(A generous dose of Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete movies is good for the soul! I list a few of their films at the end, easily available in YouTube, Amazon and other web merchants, besides being a perennial staple in the Spanish-language television channels.
Dos
tipos de cuidado [Two Troublemakers] is considered one of the best of
examples of comedia ranchera, the
hugely popular genre of Mexican cinema’s Golden Age. For the first and only time, a film paired
two singers and movie stars of phenomenal wattage: Jorge Negrete and Pedro
Infante. It would be Negrete’s last film before his untimely death in Los
Angeles in 1953, and one of Infante’s most affectionate representations of
Mexican manhood, before his also untimely death in a plane crash in 1957.
The comedia ranchera, a cowboy musical whose formula crystalized with
the enormously successful Allá en el
Rancho Grande (1936), directed by Fernando de Fuentes, combines elements of
comedy, drama, tragedy and popular music in a romanticized rural setting, laced
with folkloric and patriotic themes. Like
other popular genres of the Golden Age – spanning the thirties to the fifties –
the ranchera comedy reflects the Mexican fascination for melodrama, a hybrid
between humor and tragedy, where emotions take center stage and establish a
deep bond with popular audiences, who understand comic and dramatic situations
involving family, gender roles, work, traditions, faith, and life as a valley
of tears. Like other popular genres – the family melodrama, the urban
melodrama, the historical epic, the comedian comedy – the ranchera comedies are
a mirror that reflects Mexicanness as it was understood and lived across the
social spectrum in an era that coincided with the studio-based cinema of the
Golden Age.
Dos
tipos de cuidado is an exceptionally interesting example of comedia ranchera in that it shows a more
realistic setting, not the countryside but a provincial town as a place of
transition challenged by modern living, symbolized by the automobile. Also, the
protagonists bring to the film two very different public personas: Infante is
an icon representing the popular and traditional, mostly in urban comedies (Nosotros los pobres (1948) ATM!! (1951), Ansiedad (1953), while Negrete’s aristocratic demeanor embodies the
“noble, valiant and loyal” charro,
quoting one of his signature songs, El
charro mexicano. Thus, the enduring friendship of the protagonists – male
friendship trumps all, is the theme of the film – shows aspects of Mexican
manhood that have made some critics read as a deconstruction of Hispanic
maleness.
Audiences over the years have
glossed over this interpretation, and enjoyed the screwball elements of the story,
its clever narrative twist, the comic relief characters, and above all, the
wonderful song and dance numbers.
A lively ten-minute prologue sets
the context: Pedro Malo (Pedro Infante) and Jorge Bueno (Jorge Negrete) are best
buddies proud of their womanizing reputation, who love each other’s sister
Maria (Yolanda Varela) and cousin Rosario (Carmelita Martínez), and propose to
them during a picnic in the countryside. After a romantic tug-of-war, with
slapstick touches, Rosario accepts Jorge’s proposal, and Maria, Pedro’s. But
when the film jumps a year later to the birth of Rosario’s baby girl, after the
credit sequence, we see that she has married Pedro, her cousin, thus breaking
up the buddies’ friendship. A comedy of
errors ensues, with the audience left to make sense of the progressively more
outrageous turn of events, that involves a pompous general and an unnamed (and
presumed venereal) disease the creates plot mayhem.
One hour into the film, however,
the buddies patch up their friend in a key off screen scene, and the story
changes direction, with the audience still in the dark until the surprising
twist revealed in the picture’s climax.
A few minutes before the song-and-dance grand finale, the couples get
reconfigured, with a verbal coda delivered at breakneck speed by Rosario’s
father’s that stops short of its absurdly incestuous conclusions.
Written by Carlos Orellana, cast as
the Lebanese father of Rosario, who steals the scenes with his common sense
observations about questionable male behavior served in mangled Spanish, Dos tipos de cuidado is built like a
spool of wool that gets bigger and more tangled as the misunderstandings
accumulate. The visual motif of animal
horns attached Pedro, perceived as a henpecked husband, is a source of comedy –
and one of the reason for understanding the film as a undermining Mexican macho
behavior.
Director Ismael Rodríguez, who also
co-wrote the film, is rightfully credited for managing what must have been a
challenging project, with two major stars (think Madonna and Michael Jackson together
in a film, or The Rolling Stones and The Beatles in a concert), conscious of
their artistic personas and their fan base, and also the subject of a
press-manufactured rivalry. He directs
the film with a freshness and warmth that has stood the test of time. Rodríguez and Infante worked successfully
together before and after Dos tipos de
cuidado and Nosotros, los pobres,
in some well-remembered titles of the Golden Age: Ustedes, los ricos (1948), Los
tres huastecos (1948), Los tres
García (1948), A toda máquina!! (1951),
Pepe el Toro (1953), and Infante’s
intriguing last film Tizoc (1957).
The best scenes of Dos tipos de cuidado are, for my money,
those where music and songs are used for characterization and to advance the
screwball elements of the plot. There
are nine songs in the typical settings of comedias
rancheras: parties, community gatherings and cantinas. The serenade scene, for
example, begins with the f Pedro and Jorge each singing with a mariachi group, shown
one after the other linked by a swish span.
The rest of the sequence is a nicely rendered split screen, where they
both seem to be on the same space, singing the same song, in a romantic
crescendo. Also lovely is the singing
duel in the engagement party, where Negrete’s more powerful tenor voice tends
to overshadow Infante’s less robust but charming performance. Infante’s
rendition of the song La tertulia
celebrating the birth of his daughter (the key to the misunderstanding) is a
triumph of staging and comedy: a cantina where ladies of questionable decency (‘chamacotas’)
toast to the niceties of tradition and family values. One last example is Negrete singing another
signature song, Quiubo, quiubo cuándo? in the flashback scene that supposedly
explains Rosario’s defection to the other friend.
Screened in downtown Los Angeles –
where Mexican cinema was a staple for many decades – Dos tipos de cuidado will allow audiences to enjoy in the big
screen the only film made together by two great Mexican stars. Their cinema is still immensely entertaining,
and it’s a measure of their enduring success that Infante and Negrete’s
prolific film and music career is easily available today in the multiple-DVD
and CD collections carried by Walmart in its Hispanic media section, on
Spanish-language television, Amazon, and of course YouTube. Cinephilia is made easy
by modern means of distribution.
________
Essential books
and other films with Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante
Javier Millán Agudo, Jorge
Negrete: Ser charro no basta (2011)
Carlos Monsiváis, Pedro
Infante: Las leyes del querer (2008)
Jorge Negrete
Ay
Jalisco … no te rajes! (1941)
Fiesta
(1941, his only Mexican film)
Cuando
quiere un mexicano (1944)
Me
he de comer esa tuna (1945)
Gran
Casino (1947)
El
jorobado (1943)
Allá
en el Rancho Grande (1949)
Una
gallega en Mexico (1949)
El
rapto (1954)
Pedro Infante
Ahora
soy rico (1942)
La
razón de la culpa (1943)
Mexicanos
al grito de guerra (1943)
Vuelven
los García! (1947)
Angelitos
negros (1948)
Qué
te ha dado esa mujer?! (1951)
