Picture of an exhibition: "Carlos Gardel's 'El día que me quieras' (1935), in "¡Hablada en español!: the Legacy of Hollywood's Spanish-Language Cinema (1929-1930)"

Presented by the Instituto Cervantes, the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Preservation Society and the city of Los Angeles, this installation celebrating the films made in Spanish by the Hollywood studios between 1929 and 1939 was curated by film archivist Alejandra Espasande-Bouza, using the ground floor of the Pico House, a National Historic Landmark part of the Los Angeles Plaza Historic District.  The exhibit spans the month of June. 
 

The visit will bring to scintillating life not only an aspect of film history local to Los Angeles, but also celebrate how movies, the greatest contribution of the US to the art of the 20^th century, worked on a larger scale, in this case, reaching out to the Hispanic market worldwide.

Besides a comprehensive photo exhibit – culled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library, studio archives and private collectors – “Hablada en español” screens two features and one documentary, emblematic of the decade: Drácula (1931), the Spanish-version of the English-language original directed by James Whale; El día que me quieras (1935), the tango musical starring Carlos Gardel, an original version capitalizing on the stardom of the Argentine singer; and the excellent documentary The Spanish Dancer (2017), made by the Spanish director Mar Díaz Martínez, about Antonio Moreno, the star of the silent era active into the late 1950s (Moreno has a short but memorable role as a gallant Mexican crossing paths with vengeful Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) in Ford’s The Searchers).
 
What follows are the notes I prepared for a short talk introducing El día que me quieras, on June 22. They are intended as a record of the event and a succinct bibliography on the exhibition’s subject. 
 

After being introduced by Alejandra Espasande, my former student at UCLA, I wanted to acknowledge the work that led to carving out a field to study the making of over 130 films Spanish-language films, versions and originals:  Robert Dickson and Juan Heinink’s seminal study, Cita en Hollywood (1990) opened the door to the examination of Spanish-language versions, including Lisa Jarvinen’s The Rise of the Spanish-Language Filmmaking (2012). The territory was further mapped out by the symposium on this cinema organized by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in April 2017, during the annual gathering of the International Federation of Film Archives in Hollywood.  This resulted in the book Hollywood Goes Latin (2019), gathering several presentations, and the series “Recuerdos de un cine en español. Latin American Cinema in Los Angeles, 1930-1960” at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, organized by Jan-Christopher Horak, with Alejandra and me as co-curators, September-December 2017.  The current exhibition preserves an expansive photo and poster record of the filmmakers, actors, writers, studio executives and other people involved in these productions. A documentary covering the topic becomes an indispensable next step – all the necessary materials have been gathered by Alejandra Espasande and her team.
 

Carlos Gardel (1890-1935), the epitome of porteño culture and emblematic of Argentina, a spot he now shares with soccer player Lionel Messi, and some decades back with Armando Maradona, does not need much presentation. The Encyclopedia Britannica entry is concise yet pithy for the purpose of these notes: 

"Gardel’s huge popularity as an interpreter of the melancholy ballads of the tango was confirmed in the 1920s and ’30s in nightclubs and motion pictures. One early picture, Luces de Buenos Aires (1931), was filmed in Paris, but later ones were made by Paramount Pictures for the Spanish-speaking market. They include Espérame (1933), La casa es seria (1933), Melodía de arrabal (1933), Cuesta abajo (1934), El tango en Broadway (1934), Tango Bar (1935), El día que me quieras (1935) and The Big Broadcast of 1936 / Cazadores de estrellas (1935).

   Gardel died in a plane crash while on tour. In Buenos Aires his funeral and funeral procession in a horse-drawn carriage were witnessed by tens of thousands of Argentines. Like Rudolf Valentino’s, his tomb became an object of popular pilgrimage." (1)

An immensely popular live and radio performer, a prolific composer of tangos and popular music who sold thousands of records, Gardel understood that sound film was a cutting-edge technology to enhance his career. He must have looked at the path of Al Jolson and Bing Crosby, and not surprisingly, he must have assessed his next move was to make films in Hollywood (2). He first made ten sound shorts in Buenos Aires in 1930, featuring his well-known repertory. Its compilation, the charming Así cantaba Gardel (1936), directed by Eduardo Morera, capitalizing on the nostalgia brought by his death, has been preserved by the Fundación Cinemateca Argentina. The rest of his films – seven features, a short and a sketch in the revue The Big Broadcast of 1936 (1935) - were made for Paramount Pictures, in their Joinville, Paris, and Astoria, New York, studios. Three of these features and the short La casa es seria were shot in Joinville, between 1931 and 1934: Las luces de Buenos Aires, Melodía de arrabal and Espérame. At Paramount’s Astoria facility in Queens, New York, between December 1934 and February 1935, a few months before the tragic accident in Colombia, he made the last four and the sketch: Cuesta abajo, El tango en Broadway, El día que me quieras and Tango Bar (3). The Cinemateca Argentina has done beautiful digital restorations of these Astoria Studios films. The last contract he signed with Paramount gave Gardel unusual creative control (4).
 

When you view these seven features in no particular order you can easily see how Gardel projects an image that is really his persona – a dapper, fun-loving bon viveur with a warm heart. Seen in chronological order, however, the viewer will appreciate how the persona is being constructed, by trial and error. It was a smart collaboration between Gardel, Alfredo Le Pera (1900-1935), his lyricist and screenwriter of all seven features, who also died in the plane accident, and filmmaker John Reinhardt, who directed Gardel’s last two films, including El día que me quieras. This is Gardel for the ages – the one that “cada día canta mejor”, as the Argentine saying goes, “Gardel sings better every day”.
 

Gardel and co-star Rosita Moreno

It has been noted that these Gardel films reflect, in the portrait of the protagonists and the melodramatic circumstances of the plots, themes dear to tango music and lyrics: frustrated love, betrayal, poverty and longing for one’s place of origin.  Specific to these Paramount films are “melodramatic fantasies of romance, fame, international travel and upward social mobility” (5).

Two questions arise concerning the place of these seven films: do they belong to the history of Argentine cinema? Or are they a somewhat forgotten footnote in the development of Hollywood cinema in a decade capture where its hold of the international market was severely tested by a disruptive technology? Argentine film historians make the case that these films are an example of a national cinema with peculiar circumstances of production.  A similar argument can be advanced today for Iranian filmmakers working abroad, outside of the constrictions of the Islamic autocracy – the last films of the late Abbas Kiarostami, Asghar Farhadi and the young Iranians born or raised in Europe after the Iranian revolution.

 

Regardless of the response, it is clear Gardel’s films, mixing comedy and melodrama, loaded with song and dance, backstage musicals of the 1930s, were made to be crowd-pleasers, and this impulse – a popular cinema - helped usher the Argentine golden age of the Hollywood-patterned studio system for three decades.  Besides Gardel, one should remember the creatives and technicians that learned their craft in Los Angeles and brought it to Argentina – the cases of Carlos Borcosque and Tito Davison - or those Americans working in Hollywood that shared their know-how and experience in Argentina, such as John Alton.

Reinhardt, center, between 
Gardel and Rosita Moreno

The case of John Reinhardt, the Austrian-born actor/director hired by Fox studios to direct Spanish-language originals is of particular relevance.  After directing top talent in musicals and comedies in 1933 and 1934 for this studio – Yo, tú y ella, Granaderos del amor, Un capitán de cosacos and Dos más uno, dos – Gardel hired him for what ended being his last two Paramount projects: Tango Bar and El día que me quieras.  Rosita Moreno, the Spanish-born singer and dancer, whom Reinhardt had directed at Fox, became the female co-star, and gives memorable dual performances as a mother and daughter in El día que me quieras, and as a reformed con artist in Tango Bar. In 1941, Reinhardt traveled to Argentina for several months, and directed the crime film Último refugio (“Last Refuge”) and the romantic comedy Una novia en apuros (“A Bride in Distress), both for Baires studios. I would like to argue that in all these Spanish-language project, Reinhardt brough versatility and a sense of story that would serve him well in the low-budget noirs he directed in 1947, High Tide and The Guilty, which have been recently restored by the Film Noir Foundation.  Reinhardt has a fun cameo in El día que me quieras, as a film director wrapping up the shoot the Gardel character is doing, where else but in Hollywood.

Astor Piazzolla, left, age 13, an
extra in "El día que me quieras"

What would Gardel have done if he had not died in June 1935?  He still had two more films to make under the Paramount deal, but he had projects in the works with Lumiton studios, in Buenos Aires, and there was talk about going independent.  

We can only imagine the challenges of a Hollywood career, à la Maurice Chevalier. He had not broken into the American market, spoke limited English, but certainly appreciated its fame and appeal.
 
It's all speculation, of course. But viewing El día que me quieras, the wonderfully sentimental story of a singer, the woman he loved and lost, and their child who becomes a fine singer, and listening to the three beautiful songs of the film, “El día que me quieras”, “Sus ojos se cerraron” and “Volver”, one senses Gardel could have been a contender.

NOTES

1)  Encyclopedia Britannica online, accessed June 15, 2024.

2)  For Gardel and cinema, see the works listed in the bibliography below.

3)  For a complete filmography, see list below.

4)  See César Fratantoni's article "Carlos Gardel's Exito Productions, Inc.  A case of Hispanic 

     autonomy?, in Hollywood Goes Latin (2019).

5)  Rielle Navitski, "The Tango on Broadway: Carlos Gardel's International Stardom an the 

    Transition to Sound in Argentina", in Cinema Journal, Fall 2011, p.47.

THE FILMS OF CARLOS GARDEL

Carlos Gardel, historia de un ídolo (1964) - archival compilation directed by Solly Schroder.
 

Así cantaba Gardel (1936) – Compilation of the 1930 shorts directed by Eduardo Morera.

 The Big Broadcast of 1936 (1935) Dir. Norman Taurog. Gardel sketch written Alfredo Le Pera. Cinematography by Leo Tover. Paramount Pictures, Astoria studios. Only in the Spanish version, cut from the English-language version owing to Gardel’s death, prior to the film’s release in the US in September 1935.
 

Tango Bar (1935) Dir. John Reinhardt. Written Alfredo Le Pera. Cinematography by William Miller. Exito Productions. Paramount Pictures, Astoria studios, New York.
 
El día que me quieras (1935) Dir. John Reinhardt. Written Alfredo Le Pera. Cinematography by William Miller. Exito Productions. Paramount Pictures, Astoria studios, New York.
 
El tango en Broadway (1934) Dir. Louis J. Gasnier. Written Alfredo Le Pera. Cinematography by William Miller. Exito Productions. Paramount Pictures, Astoria studios, New York. 
 
Cuesta abajo (1934) Dir. Louis J. Gasnier. Written Alfredo Le Pera. Cinematography by George Webber. Exito Productions. Paramount Pictures, Astoria studios, New York.
 

La casa es seria (1933) Short. Dir. Lucien Jaquelux. Written Alfredo Le Pera. Paramount Pictures, Joinville studios, Paris.
 
Melodía de arrabal (1933) Dir. Louis J. Gasnier. Written Alfredo Le Pera. Cinematography by Harry Stradling. Paramount Pictures, Joinville studios.
 
Esperáme (1933) Dir. Louis J. Gasnier. Written Alfredo Le Pera. Cinematography by Harry Stradling. Paramount Pictures, Joinville studios, Paris.
 
Las luces de Buenos Aires (1931) Dir. Adelqui Millar. Written Luis Bayón Herrera, Manuel Romero. Cinematography by Ted Pahle. Paramount Pictures, Joinville studios, Paris.
 
Ten shorts directed by Eduardo Morera, produced by Federico Valle, with cinematography by Roberto Schmidt. Titles are those of the songs.

Yira, yira (1931) 

¡Leguisamo solo! (1930)

El quinielero (1930) 

Viejo smoking (1930) 

El inquilino (1930) 

Tengo miedo (1930)

Padrino pelao (1930) 

Mano a mano (1930) 

Enfundá la mandolina (1930) 

El carretero (1930) 

Canchero (1930) 

Añoranzas (1930) 

Rosa de otoño (1930) 

 
La loba (1916-1919) Dir. Francisco Defilippis Novoa. Lost film, details uncertain.
 
Flor de durazno (1917) Dir. Francisco Defilippis Novoa. Prod. Federico Valle. Adapted from Hugo Wast’s novel Flor de durazno.
 

Sources: IMDb, Cine Nacional and Simon Collier (“Carlos Gardel and the Cinema”, in Garden of Forking Paths, 1988)

LIST OF SOURCES

 
Collier, Simon, “Gardel and the Cinema”.  In The Garden of Forking Paths (1988)
 
Di Nubila, Historia del cine argentino: La época de oro (1998)
 
Finkielman, Jorge, The Film Industry in Argentina. An Illustrated Cultura History (2004)
 
Jarvinen, Jarvinen, The Rise of Spanish-Language Filmmaking (2012)
 
King, John, Magical Reels. A History of Cinema in Latin America. 2^nd ed. (2002)
 
Navitski, Rielle, “The Tango on Broadway: Carlos Gardel's International Stardom and the Transition to Sound in Argentina”. Cinema Journal, vol.51, no.1, Fall 2011, pp.26-49
 
Peña, Fernado M., Cien años de cine argentino (2012)
 
Smith, Steven C., John Reinhardt, Director Without Borders (2022) Documentary short
 
Waldman, Harry, Paramount in Paris. 300 Films Produced at the Joinville Studios, 1930-1933, with Credits and Biographies (1998)