Los tallos amargos (1956) at the Million Dollar Theatre in downtown Los Angeles

Los tallos amargos (1956), directed by Fernando Ayala

Los tallos amargos was hiding in plain sight in a private collector’s home in Buenos Aires, when Fernando Martín Peña, an Argentine film historian and curator at MALBA – Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires – arranged with Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation to have it restored. With the foundation providing the funds and the UCLA Film & Television Archive doing the lab work, the film got an unexpected new life in 2016, when, among other U.S. screenings, it became part of a six-film series at the Museum of Modern Art: “Death Is My Dance Partner: Film Noir in Postwar Argentina”.   It should be noted, too, that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association also contributed to its restoration. Los tallos amargos is a knockout film, and the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles is proud to show it as part of the 2019 Last Remaining Seats program of the LA Conservancy. The film screens on Saturday, June 8, at 2pm, at the Million Dollar Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.

 

In 1954, journalist Adolfo Jasca submitted his novel “Los tallos amargos” [The Bitter Stems] to the prestigious literary contest of the publishing house Emecé, which gave it the first prize and recommended its publication.  The novel captured the atmosphere of the newspaper world in the Buenos Aires of the 1950s as the background for a story involving a reporter, Alfredo Gasper; a Lithuanian refugee, Paar Liudas; and the journalism school by mail they concoct that leads to a seemingly perfect crime. The novel unfolded as a porteño update of Crime and Punishment. The essentials of the story were transferred to the film version of the same title, two years later, even though Liudas became a Hungarian exile.  The film was a box-office success and earned top prizes from the Argentine critics association, for best film and best direction, in 1957. 

Fernando Ayala

Made as an independent production, and released through Artistas Argentinos Asociados, it was the second picture directed by Fernando Ayala (1920-1997), a filmmaker whose long career began at the end of the classic studio system and became emblematic of the new Argentine auteur cinema in the 1960s.  With Héctor Olivera, Ayala founded Aries Cinematográfica, a production and distribution company relevant until the late 1990s, which combined commercial fare with titles that provided an astute critique of social and political issues, grounded in real-life situations recognizable by Argentine audiences.  Always engaging, Ayala’s filmography is a road map to understand modern Argentina’s permanent state of turmoil, with its cycles of boom and bust, and its impact on the middle class. Among his most renowned titles are: El jefe (1958), Paula cautiva (1963), La fiaca (1969), La guita (1970), Plata dulce (1982) and El arreglo (1983).

Los tallos amargos belongs to the visual style we now call noir– a term coined by French critics to describe the style and content of American crime films made in the forties and fifties.  Interestingly, U.S. and European filmmakers like John Huston, Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder and Orson Welles, among others, working in the Hollywood system, did not describe their work using this term. Films like The Maltese Falcon, Phantom Lady, The Woman in the Window, Caught,Laura, Double Indemnity and The Lady from Shanghai reflected a sensibility, a mood, a visual flair, that showcased psychological narratives where the action “however violent or fast-paced was less significant than faces, gestures, words, than the truth of the characters”, as New Yorker critic Richard Brody noted when reviewing two noir retrospectives in 2014. French critics had observed this prevalence of psychological narrative over action, and borrowed the term noir– black –from the title of a collection crime fiction to describe these stylish Hollywood black and white dramas of the forties and fifties.

Ensayo de un crimen (1955) by Luis Buñuel

Even if it is problematic to think of noir as a well-defined genre – like westerns, comedies or musicals – since it is primarily a visual style, determined by particular circumstances and heavily rooted in German Expressionism and a pessimistic worldview, the term has gained purchase, albeit as a “peculiar genre”, in Brody’s words. It has become a standard shortcut to group crime titles, in a large or narrow sense, where character studies are the focus of the films. In the case of Mexican cinema, Luis Buñuel’s Él (1953) and Ensayo de un crimen(1955) fit the description.  When proposing an evaluation of Latin American crime cinema, MOMA entitled its two landmark retrospectives in 2015 and 2016,  “Mexico at Midnight: Film Noir from Mexican Cinema’s Golden Age” and  “Death is My Dance Partner: Film Noir in Postwar Argentina”. 

If Buñuel did not think of his psychological studies of perverted masculinities in terms of a homegrown form of noir, neither did a young Fernando Ayala when he transferred the postwar paranoia of the literary original to Buenos Aires locations and studio sets rendered in the noir palette.  He was an avid moviegoer well versed in genre conventions, and European and American styles; and he had finished his first film film, Ayer fue primavera(1955), a romantic drama reconstructed from flashbacks.

Carlos Cores

Los tallos amargos showcases the increasing paranoia of the protagonist Alfredo Gasper (starring Carlos Cores, 1923-2000, a major star since the 1940s), the Argentine-born son of a German WWI military, with a tormented personality, while portraying Liudas, the Hungarian refugee (Vassili Lambrinos, 1926-2017, a dancer and choreographer born in Egypt) in ambiguous terms, thanks to the clever use of interlocking flashbacks. He is seen as refracted by the protagonist, and later as remembered by his son Jarvis (Pablo Moret). 

In staging the story as an atmospheric crime film, or “policial”, Ayala was ably supported by cinematographer Ricardo Younis (1918-2011), who also had a long and distinguished career in the Argentine film industry.  The reviews of this restored version of Los tallos amargos note that in a 2000 survey the American Cinematographer lists the picture as one the Best Shot Films between 1950 and 1997.  (Beware of the substandard copies of the film found in YouTube!). 

The dream sequence at the beginning of the film is an excellent instance of cinematography and mise-en-scène rendering the protagonist’s fragile ego; it is a visual forecast of Gasper’s unraveling, which unfolds like clockwork as a result of a fateful decision. The budding romance of Gasper’s sister Esther (Gilda Lousek, an upcoming actress with a long career in film and television) and Liuda’s son Jarvis serves as a counterpoint: it restores the moral order at the end of the film, not without irony.   The seeds that have germinated – the “stems” of the original Spanish title -  bring new life, but they carry the weight (“bitter”) of the past.

Rooted in a time and place, Los tallos amargos is a gripping film shaped by the noir conventions of the time. To better grasp what it brought to Argentine cinema in the 1950s, I would like to suggest an analogy with the stunning Argentine neo-noir Relatos salvajes(2014), directed by Daniel Szifrón, sixty years after the Ayala film. Its style and subject matter embody the Argentine zeitgeist of today.

List of sources

Brody, Richard, “Film Noir: The Elusive Genre”. The New Yorker, July 23, 2014. https://www.artforum.com/film/id=58064

“Death Is My Dance Partner: Film Noir in Postwar Argentina”. Program Notes, Museum of Modern Art, February 10-16, 2016. https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/1616

Green Quintana, Roberto, “El vampire negro/Los tallos amargos”. Program Notes, “Recuerdos de un cine en español: Latin American Cinema in Los Angeles, 1930-1960”. UCLA Film and Television Archive series, Fall 2017. https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/2017/10/28/vampiro-negro-tallos-amargos

Krieger, Clara and Alejandra Portela, Eds, Cine Latinoamericano I: Diccionario de realizadores. Buenos Aires, Ediciones del Jilguero, 1997.

Lerman, Gabriel, “La HFPA ayuda a restaurar una obra maestra del cine latinoamericano”. Hollywood Foreign Press Association, February 10, 2016. https://www.goldenglobes.com/articles/la-hfpa-ayuda-restaurar-una-obra-maestra-del-cine-latinoamericano

Manrupe, Raúl, and María Alejandra Portela, Un diccionario de filmes argentinos. Buenos Aires, Corregidor, 1995.

Nick Pinkerton, “Dead Can Dance”.  Artforum, February 10, 2016. https://www.artforum.com/film/id=58064

"Dos tipos de cuidado", with Pedro Infante & Jorge Negrete, at the Palace Theatre in downtown Los Angeles

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.

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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)