The Library of Congress organized its first Film and Sound Festival at the AFI Silver theater in Silver Spring, Maryland, from June 15 to 18, 2023. I received a lovely invitation to introduce three films: Frenchman's Creek (1944, dir. Mitchell Leisen), Craig's Wife (1936, dir. Dorothy Arzner) and Carne de Cabaret (1931, dir. Christy Cabanne). Here is the last of the three introductions, presented on June 18.
Carne de cabaret (1931)
Directed by William Cabana [Christy Cabanne]
With Lupita Tovar, Ramón Pereda and René Cardona
Ten cents a dance / That's what they pay me
Gosh, how they weigh me down / Ten cents a dance
Pansies and rough guys / Tough guys who tear my gown
Seven to midnight I hear drums / Loudly the saxophone blows
Trumpets are breaking my eardrums / Customers crush my toes
Sometime I think / I've found my hero
But it's a queer romance / All that you need is a ticket
Come on, big boy, ten cents a dance
“Ten Cents a Dance”, Lyrics by Lorenz Hart, music by Richard Rodgers
Like Drácula, the Spanish-speaking film made by Universal Studios in 1931, Carne de cabaret, released the same year by Columbia Pictures, also in Spanish and starring Lupita Tovar (1910-2016), makes for an illuminating case study of how the Hollywood studios implemented a strategy to keep the foreign-language markets supplied with films, once synched sound became a viable technology. A disruptive innovation, expensive to implement but quickly embraced by audiences worldwide, sound meant that keeping the flow of pictures south of the border required a novel strategy: making Spanish-language versions of English-language originals. Before dubbing and subtitling became the standard practice by the end of the 1930s, the studios - including later in the decade some independent producers - opened Spanish-language divisions to provide such films. The story of foreign versions goes beyond Spanish, to comprise remakes of original English-language films in French, German and other languages. Paramount’s Joinville studios, in Paris, and Astoria, in New York, implemented this strategy, as did MGM, Fox and Columbia in Los Angeles. The English and German versions of Anna Christie (1930), starring Greta Garbo in both, serves as a perfect illustration of this early 1930s business stratagem.
Film historian Lisa Jarvinen has written the indispensable account of how the Hollywood studios developed, implemented, and ultimately discarded this practice, with an eye to securing the 30% of the international market represented by Latin America and Spain: The Rise of Spanish-Language Filmmaking: Out from Hollywood's Shadow, 1929-1939 (2012). For a survey of these films aimed at the Hispanic market, the compilation provided by Juan B. Heinink and Robert G. Dixon, Cita en Hollywood, included in the compilation volume Hollywood Goes Latin (2019) is the point of departure.
A preferred practice of these remakes was to use the same sets of the English versions, adapting the original screenplay by Spanish writers as a “versión española” - Spanish version. Since the directors spoke no Spanish, “dialogue directors” handled the performances. However, what was a cost savings strategy soon revealed that literal translations were no guarantee for making appealing Spanish-language films, and that the variety of Spanish accents was an issue for Hispanic audiences.
Even though some Spanish-versions of 1930-1931 and then original Spanish pictures showed that Hollywood could make popular films with stars such as singers Carlos Gardel (Paramount) and José Mojica (Fox), Argentine-born Spanish singer and actress Imperio Argentina and newcomer Lupita Tovar, “overall they were not profitable enough to justify their large-scale production once studios began to suffer the effects of the economic depression”, as Jarvinen writes. Also, the film industries of Mexico and Argentina, patterned after the American studios, had taken off by the mid-1930s and began their golden age.
This is the context necessary to understand how Lupita Tovar, a 20-year-old Mexican actress, with no formal training, scouted by Robert Flaherty for Fox Studios, made Drácula and Carne de cabaret, for Universal and Columbia, in 1931 and starred in Santa the following year. This melodrama was the first major Mexican success of the sound era; it was directed by Antonio Moreno, the Spanish-born Hollywood star of the 1920s, who had co-starred with Tovar in the Spanish-version of The Cat Creeps (1930), La voluntad del muerto, for Universal, a few months before the Dracula Spanish-version.
Lupita Tovar made more than thirty films, playing mostly ingenues and “señoritas” in a career that spanned two decades on both sides of the border. Some of her films are East of Borneo (1931, Universal), Border Law (1931, Columbia), Vidas rotas (1934), Alas sobre el Chaco (1935, Spanish-language version of Storm over the Andes, Universal, El Capitán Tormenta (Grand National) (1935, Spanish-language version of Captain Calamity, Grand National) and María (1938, based on the 19th century Colombian novel by Jorge Isaac, made in Mexico).
In 1932 she married Paul Kohner, a producer at Universal, who headed the foreign language department and who cast Lupita in Drácula. They moved to Berlin when Kohner headed Universal’s European productions but returned to Los Angeles as the political situation deteriorated in Germany with the rise of Nazism. In 1938, Kohner founded the Paul Kohner Talent Agency and managed the careers of many actors and directors, including Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Dolores del Río, Billy Wilder, Henry Fonda and Ingmar Bergman. The couple had two children, Pancho, a director and producer, and Susan, a film and television actress. Their grandchildren, Chris and Paul Weitz, have successful careers in Hollywood as writers and directors. Currently in the works is a project by the Weitz brothers about the courtship of their grandparents while filming the Spanish Dracula.
In The Sweetheart of Mexico. A Memoir. As Told to Her Son Pancho Kohner, published in 2011, Tovar gives us an engaging account of her life and times, spanning her Mexican childhood and adolescence, Hollywood and Berlin in the 1930s, and her career in Mexico until she retired in the mid-1940s.
She writes about Carne de cabaret: “Frank Fouce was an assistant director I had met at Columbia Studios. When they were casting the Spanish version of Lionel Barrymore’s Ten Cents a Dance, with Barbara Stanwyck, Frank suggested me for Barbara’s part. So I went to Columbia Studios to do Carne de cabaret, which was the title of the Spanish version. It was directed by Eduardo Arozamena and W. Christy Cabanne. Ramón Pereda and Rene Cardona starred opposite me. Our Spanish-language version took just two weeks. One “take” was all we were allowed, so we had to get it right the first time. This was one of the last films to get away with sexy innuendos before the studios started censoring their own movies to keep the government from interfering”.
Carnet de cabaret tells the story of Dorothy O’Neil, a dance hall girl in New York, trying to navigate in a man’s world, as the festival catalog aptly summarizes. The original version is Ten Cents a Dance, inspired by the Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers song of the same title. This English-language original shows the difficulties of finding love in the working-class milieu of taxi dancers, starring 23-year-old Barbara Stanwyck (1907-1990), as an innocent young woman called Barbara O’Neill. Two years later, in Baby Face, Stanwyck is in full pre-Code mode, as a social climber who uses sex to advance in life.
Carne de cabaret uses the same screenplay and dramatic structure. Both versions also utilize the same five or six sets – all interiors, except for one park scene; and mostly the same props. Viewing the films side by side, however, one can notice small variations in dresses, hats and even the order of the scenes. Many of the crowd shots in the dancing hall are the same in both films. There are a couple of short colorful additions in Carne de cabaret, including a sexy scene involving a young messenger watching a dancer undress, as reflected in a mirror.
In another instance, an establishing shot of a busy public space simply lifts a shot from Ten Cents a Dance and shows Barbara Stanwyck instead of Lupita Tovar. One wonders what editor Logan Pearson must have thought looking for the Tovar shot he needed and could not find. He must have hoped no one would notice.
The Hispanic community of Hollywood in the early 1930s was small but tight, and many of these writers, dialogue directors and actors later brought the American knowhow to the film industries of their home countries, most notably Mexico, Argentina and Spain. In his no-holds-barred memoir My Last Sigh (1984), Luis Buñuel gives a vivid description of the Spanish-language colony during his stay in Los Angeles for a few months in 1930-1931.
In Carne de cabaret, Tovar found herself surrounded by several of these interesting Hispanics. Eduardo Arozamena, a Mexican actor who had participated in Drácula, was the dialogue director, while René Borgia, a Venezuelan writer who later settled in New York, adapted the dialogue – colorful and sexy. Ramón Pereda, a Spanish-born Mexican actor, plays Bradley Carleton, the divorced rich man attracted by the innocent Dorothy, and René Cardona, in his first film credit, is Tovar’s husband, Eddie Miller, who turns out to be not what her good heart thought he was. Pereda and Cardona parlayed their stay in 1930s Hollywood into careers in the Mexican film industry.
Hispanic audiences in the 1930s – and also today – would have noticed a characteristic feature of the Spanish language (absent in English): the difference between “tú”, an informal, familiar way of addressing someone, and the formal, respectful “usted”. This distinction plays an important role in presenting the relationship between Dorothy and Carlton, the older divorced man. The use of “usted” until the last line of the film gives a courteous and proper tone to the otherwise immoral proposition Carlton makes to Dorothy earlier in Carne de cabaret. To the Spanish-speaking audience, their relationship is linguistically respectful but clearly has moved to a more intimate stage when they address each other as “tú” for the first time before “Fin” (The End) appears on the screen.
Two key Americans were involved above the line in Carne de cabaret. One was director Christy Cabanne, listed in the credits as William Cabana, a veteran of the silent era, who had apprenticed under D. W. Griffith, and had the reputation for working efficiently. The other one was Columbia screenwriter Jo Swerling, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant brought up in the Lower East side whose collaboration with Frank Capra included Platinum Blonde (1931) and Forbidden (1932). In Ten Cents a Dance and Carne de cabaret he captured with gritty realism the New York of the 1920s. Swerling gave strong visuals to the song; he transformed into dramatic scenes the laments and grumbles of the dance hall girl who graphically describes her situation:
Ten cents a dance / That's what they pay me/ Gosh, how they weigh me down / Ten cents a dance / Pansies and rough guys / Tough guys who tear my gown / Seven to midnight I hear drums / Loudly the saxophone blows / Trumpets are breaking my eardrums / Customers crush my toes.
What holds this film together is the performance of Lupita Tovar: her Dorothy is a charming mix of naiveté and resilience … and a Spanish accent that is studiously neutral, to travel well across the Hispanic world. Her dramatic intensity will look more persuasive to many viewers than that of Barbara Stanwyck’s, especially the well-handled bedroom scene that lays out, through facial gestures and body language, the high price she has to pay to keep her husband out of jail.
The Library of Congress premieres tonight a digital restoration of this film that has not been seen for decades. Maybe Lupita Tovar’s performance will be rediscovered, like Drácula’s, by new a generation of cinephiles.
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List of sources
AFI Catalog of Feature Films. The First 100 Years, 1893 - 1993 (2006). "Carne de cabaret" (1931).
Heinink, Juan B., and Robert G. Dickson, “Cita en Hollywood”, in Hollywood Goes
Latin. Spanish-language Cinema in Los Angeles, edited by María Elena de las
Carreras and Jan-Christopher Horak (2019).
Jarvinen, Lisa. The Rise of Spanish-Language Filmmaking: Out from Hollywood's
Shadow, 1929-1939 (2012).
Tovar, Lupita. The Sweetheart of Mexico. A Memoir. As Told to Her Son Pancho
Kohner (2011).
Tovar, Lupita. Obituary, New York Times, November 20, 2016.
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