Buñuel in Mexico: El gran calavera (1949)

The following are the program notes I wrote for the screening of El Gran Calavera (1949) organized by the Latin American Cinemateca.  It is part of the Los Angeles Conservancy series "Last Remaining Seats", to unfold next June in historic downtown theaters.  This film, directed by Luis Buñuel, will screen at the Palace Theatre on June 25, 2014.

Among the thirty-two films directed by the Spanish-born iconoclast Luis Buñuel between 1929 and 1977, in France, Mexico and Spain, El gran calavera is perhaps the most undiluted comedy of his career. The filmmaker called películas alimenticias (bread-and-butter films) those projects he directed from the late forties throughout the fifties, as an exile after the Spanish Civil War, first in the U.S. and then in Mexico, in need to feed his family.  The adjective in Spanish is used both ironically and seriously, because these pictures allowed for his filmmaking career to resume after a long hiatus, started by two still shocking Surrealist films in France, Un chien andalou (1929) and L’age d’or (1930) and the no less disturbing documentary Las Hurdes - Land without Bread (1933).  The huge commercial success of El gran calavera made possible Los olvidados (1950), an unsentimental and brutal chronicle about children in the slums of Mexico City. (Amores perros (2000) is, in part, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s conversation with Buñuel fifty years later about those in the fringes of society).

Compared to Buñuel’s Mexican masterpieces Él (1953), The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955), Nazarín (1959), The Exterminating Angel (1962), and other melodramas and satirical comedies like Mexican Bus Ride (1952), El bruto (1953) and La ilusión viaja en tranvía (1954), El gran calavera can be dismissed as a hackneyed job, a white telephone comedy of errors with a by-the-numbers plot involving the downfall of a rich and selfish family, through layers of deception and intrigue.  A world made topsy-turvy by a widowed drunkard patriarch Don Ramiro (Fernando Soler) wishing to teach a lesson to his family, becomes absurdly restored at the end, with everybody learning a lesson about the value of work and responsibility.  The wealthy are ironized and the poor idealized – broad strokes that would be refined in his next films, showing that in this imperfect world, good and evil are intertwined.

Shot in less than three weeks, this nonsensical comedy, the second of his Mexican period, shows that the seeds of a Surrealist universe shaped by irony and absurdity have been transplanted in new soil:  the satirical critique of the bourgeois family, the clash between desire and social conventions, and a counterpointing style that combines a popular film genre with a Spanish realism and acerbic wit. No idealized indigenous exaltation in the leading style of Emilio Fernández, singing charros or exuberant melodramas.

Two funny scenes stand out for their wonderful use of sound counterpoint.  In the first one, the enterprising working-class Pablo (Rubén Rojo) courts Virginia (Rosario Granados), the millionaire’s spoiled daughter, now barely making ends meet as a laundress. The courtship takes place in his van, fitted with loudspeakers for making commercial announcements.  The private conversation, full of advances, retreats and innuendos, is heard by the neighborhood because the loudspeaker has been accidentally left on.  This foreshadows the film’s climax, a perfectly timed duel between the words of a priest in a fancy church marrying Virginia and the aristocratic bum vying for her recovered fortune, and Pablo, announcing ham and female underwear outside of the church.  This juxtaposition of the wedding vows with an over the top commercial speech yields pearls such as: “the chastity of marriage … is only possible with stockings Sigh of Venus …”

A wonderful gallery of sharply observed types – the hypochondriac aunt, the gambling uncle, the good-for-nothing son, a no-nonsense physician uncle, the conniving suitor and his over-bearing mother – give the story spice and flair. 

Lightweight and fanciful, El gran calavera is still a pleasure to watch.  The proof is in the pudding:  last year Mexican director Gary Alazraki, from a well-known filmmaking dynasty, made Nosotros los Nobles, an updated version of Buñuel’s comedy.  Imitation is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery. 

Essential bibliography

Francisco Aranda, Luis Buñuel, A Critical Biography (1985)

Luis Buñuel, Mi último suspiro (1982)

Peter William Evans and Isabel Santaolalla, editors, Luis Buñuel, New Readings (2004)

José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent, Objects of Desire, Conversations with Luis Buñuel (1992)

Subversive humor: Cantinflas musketeer

On Wednesday, June 20, 2012, at 8pm, the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles  will screen       Los Tres Mosqueteros (The Three Musketeers, 1942), directed by Miguel M. Delgado, with Cantinflas  (139 minutes).  As part of the L.A. Conservancy series "Last Remaining Seats", the film will be shown at the magnificently restored Million Dollar Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.

Below are the program notes I wrote for the event.

Los Tres Mosqueteros spoofs the beloved historical novel by Alexander Dumas.  Comic legend Mario Moreno, “Cantinflas”, stars as the street savvy Mexican proletarian emerging in a dream as the dashing d’Artagnan in17th century France. 

Like Germán Valdez, “Tin Tan”, and Niní Marshall, “Catita”, Mario Moreno “Cantinflas” belongs to the pantheon of great Latin American comedians of the forties and fifties who brought a unique comic persona to the screen.  Their humor blends slapstick and linguistic mannerisms, thrives on parody and excels in the sharp portrait of popular characters.  They use film as a vehicle for amiable social satire, a mirror that reflects shared national traits, anchored in the perspective of the common people.

Born in the working-class neighborhood of Tepito, Mexico City, in 1911, Mario Moreno honed his comic persona performing in ‘carpa’, or tent, vaudeville shows. He combined physical comedy with a knack for verbal improvisation, and a studied nonchalance when his sentimentalized low-life characters had to face the powerful, the rich, the bureaucrats.

Mario Moreno once defined “Cantinflas” as ‘the prototype of the humble people from the urban barrio … superficially educated and practically non-existent socially, but with a highly developed ingenuity (a Mexican characteristic), a formidable astuteness – and a large and open heart”.  In fifty films over forty years Moreno offers variations on this prototype: the little man who is perennially broke, a ‘pelado’ (literally, without hair, stripped clean) pushed by poverty to be a jack-of-all-trades, resilient and witty facing the catastrophes of life. His pants hang off his hips, he sports a pencil-thin moustache, a raggedy hat and has no sense of style.

A trademark of “Cantinflas” is his unique type of nonsense speech, mixing double-talk, alliterations, malapropisms, highfalutin affectation and pantomime delivered at breakneck speed and incomprehensible.  The Real Academia Española de la Lengua incorporated “cantinflada” as a noun in its venerable dictionary.

Intellectuals and academic have examined the popularity of “Cantinflas” and his endearing qualities in studies that discuss him as a metaphor for the chaos of Mexican modernity in the 20^th century.  In the words of cultural historian Ilan Stavans “Cantinflas” is an example of the “delightful if tortuous relationship between a Europeanized elite and the hybrid masses in a continent … imprisoned in the labyrinth of identity”. 

Audiences, then and today, may sense these social dislocations when they see a “Cantinflas” film – a staple of Spanish-language television - but what they will most experience is a breath of fresh air and the impulse to laugh heartily at the adventures of an unforgettable character. 

All this will be nicely evident in The Three Musketeers, an affectionate parody not only of a beloved literary classic but of the lavish costume dramas favored by Hollywood in the 1940s, with the Spanish theater of the Golden Age thrown in the mix.  The adaptation excels in the hilarious treatment of speech, a systematic counterpoint between a Siglo de Oro parsimonious delivery– as if the actors were performing in a play by Calderón o Lope de Vega – and the Mexican slang of “Cantinflas” spitted out at breakneck speed.  In one funny scene, the devious cardinal Richeliu is carefully modulating a speech on love and d’Artagnan interrupts him with a pun on love and car mufflers, untranslatable in English: “que el amor puro … que el amor diáfano … que el amor …amortiguador … qué pasa con el amor?”

The plotline is simple: in a working class cabaret “Cantinflas” retrieves the necklace stolen from a beautiful actress, who invites him to the studio where she stars in a costume drama.  Mistaken for an extra, the unruly “Cantinflas” creates havoc on the set.  Quarantined in the star’s dressing room, he falls asleep and dreams he is d’Artagnan.  The story follows the main events of the novel: the young swordsman from Gascogne meets the seasoned musketeers of the King’s guard, and very soon – “one for all, all for one” – gets commissioned by the Queen to retrieve a missing necklace from England.   The mission is fulfilled on time for “Cantinflas” to wake up, late at night; the only ones left are his three faithful friends, true musketeers with whom he goes off in search of new adventures.  They are as materially deprived as in the beginning, but immensely enriched by a life of dreams and imagination.

This clever linguistic contrast between speech cadence and delivery styles, and the clash of old-fashioned and modern (even invented) Spanish grammatical forms were ratcheted up a notch in the comedian’s following film, Romeo y Julieta (1943).  In this spoof, a tragedy is given a comedic twist, and the dialogue of the play inside the film is written in verse.  

Another source of comedy is the recurrent use of the antiquated personal pronoun ‘Vos’ (Thou) and its corresponding verbal conjugation (ending in ‘áis’ or ‘éis’) made to rime with the modern day ‘Tú’ (You) and, to top it, an invented  conjugation.   Anachronism is further milked for comic effect with the use of the ‘ranchera’ songs.

With this screening of Los Tres Mosqueteros the Latin American Cinemateca wants to toast Mario Moreno “Cantinflas” on his centennial, and celebrate once more a comedic genius who embodies the exuberant sentimentality of life in Latin America. 

Essential filmography

Ahí está el detalle (1940)

Ni sangre ni arena (1941)

Los Tres Mosqueteros (1942)

Romeo y Julieta (1943)

Gran hotel (1944)

Un día con el diablo (1945)

El siete machos (1950)

Si yo fuera diputado (1951)

Abajo el telón (1954)

El bolero de Raquel (1956)

Around the World in Eighty Days (1956)

Pepe (1960)

El extra (1962)

Don Quijote sin mancha (1969)

El patrullero 777 (1978)

                                                  Some books on “Cantinflas”

Carl Mora, Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society 1896-1980 (1982)

Jeffrey Pilcher, Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity (2001)

Ilan Stavans, The Riddle of Cantinflas: Essays on Hispanic Popular Culture (1998)