David Melville writes —

Fans of old Hollywood may remember Dolores del Rio as a ravishing beauty who couldn’t act. Moving from Mexico to the US in the late 20s, she played decorative roles in largely mediocre films. Even the classic South Seas romance Bird of Paradise (King Vidor, 1932) used her less as an actress than as a live Gauguin painting. The musical Wonder Bar (Lloyd Bacon, 1934) gave her little to do beyond a sadomasochist tango with whips. By the early 40s, not even her liaison with Orson Welles could get Dolores a role in a decent film.

So it was a shock all round when Dolores – who was just short of 40 – returned home to Mexico, and promptly became her country’s reigning dramatic star. Her role as a virginal peasant girl in María Candelaria (Emilio Fernandez, 1943) proved that yes, she could act after all. Just not in English (in which she never seemed at ease) and not in the frankly unactable roles that Hollywood chose to give her. At a time when the US industry, cut off from its European audience, was making half-hearted efforts to woo the Latin American market, the romantic melodramas of del Rio and Fernandez were proof – glorious proof – that latinos could go it alone.

The fourth and most lavish of these is Bugambilia (1945). (The title, and the heroine’s nickname, is a florid purple flower that runs wild on every available wall in hot climates.) In this one, Dolores (refreshingly) does not play a poor but virtuous peasant waif, albeit one who strays in photogenic and melodramatic ways. Her role here draws on her own upper-class background. (Her family, like that of her distant cousin Ramón Novarro, had lost much of their land and fortune to the Mexican Revolution.) Here she plays a spoiled and capricious 19th century coquette, flouncing about in crinolines and bathing in an Olympic-size marble bathtub, afloat with rose petals.

Her character, of course, is instantly recognisable as Bette Davis in Jezebel (William Wyler, 1938) or Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) or even Elizabeth Taylor in Raintree County (Edward Dmytryk, 1957). Yet much of our pleasure in Mexican melodrama lies in the way it emulates Hollywood models – yet also transforms them in unexpected, often subversive ways. Her key relationship, for most of the film, is not with her love interest (Pedro Armendáriz) but with her fiercely possessive (indeed, borderline incestuous) father. A rich widower, he cherishes her as “something more than a daughter…more like a living copy of her mother.” A huge Gothic portrait hangs on the wall, Rebecca-style, as if to prove the point.

Into this menage comes Armendáriz – a swarthy, moustachioed peasant whose profession (in a stroke of none-too-subtle symbolism) is that of cock fighter. He drops in to introduce his prize cock to del Rio’s prize laying hen. In what is surely a first for a ‘family’ movie, the cock mounts the hen while Dolores – her eyes widening in her exquisitely sculpted face – does a creditable job of looking shocked. Later on, she attends a grand ball, where she knows her lover is watching from the street outside, and has an enormous sequinned cock (of the bird variety) spangled on her fan.

We know, of course, that the liaison is doomed. Class barriers normally prove to be insuperable in Mexican movies, with a cynicism (or, perhaps, an honesty) that is rare in films from north of the Río Grande. Still, the ball scene is the film’s lyrical highlight, an orgy of billowing gowns and sparkling chandeliers that’s easily comparable to Vincente Minnelli’s film of Madame Bovary (1949). Platoons of waltzing ladies spread across the floor, petal-like, in overhead shots that might have been engineered by Busby Berkeley’s long-lost Mexican cousin.

An obsessively literal-minded viewer might complain (as Michael Caine did after a trip to Mexico) that del Rio and Armendáriz always look like film stars and never look like anything else, and “that is what is wrong with Mexican films.” Such a complaint is only slightly more logical than watching a performance of Swan Lake and saying that Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn always look like ballet dancers – as if that detracts, somehow, from their dancing. We are dealing, in both cases, with a stylised art form that appeals on a supra-literal level of archetype and myth. No sane person, least of all a working class Mexican viewer of the 40s, would take Bugambilia for an exercise in gritty realism.

In fact, the opening and closing scenes (the bulk of the film is a long flashback) move Bugambilia away from the genre we think we recognise and into the realm of a Gothic ghost story. The mise-en-scene shifts to that of Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) or Dragonwyck (Joseph L Mankiewicz, 1946) or Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle, 1948). Our heroine, sobered by her inevitable defeat, walls herself up inside her crumbling ancestral mansion. The camera (directed by the legendary Gabriel Figueroa) pulls back in a spectacular crane shot; we sense the ghosts of Miss Havisham and Norma Desmond hovering just outside the frame. Dolores del Rio is easily their equal in the high melodrama stakes. A pity that nobody in Hollywood had the sense to see it.

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Language(s):Spanish
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The post Emilio Fernández – Bugambilia (1945) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

On a small Mexican island dwells a group of Indians who live in the traditional manner and who disdain outsiders. The beautiful Maclovia and the poverty-stricken Jose Maria are in love, but her father refuses to allow their marriage, or even any communication between them, due to Jose Maria’s lack of means. The young man strives to educate himself and earn enough to purchase his own fishing boat in order to win her father’s favor. At the same time, a batallion of soldiers is posted there, and the brutal sergeant develops eyes for Maclovia. The conflicts come to a head on the Night of the Dead. Written by GoblinHairedGuy

1.56GB | 1h 40m | 700×476 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/F31DC712591CC30/Maclovia.1948.DVDRip.x264-FuFu.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/64C778F689318CA/Maclovia.1948.DVDRip.x264-FuFu.en.srt

Language:Spanish
Subtitles:English

The post Emilio Fernández – Maclovia (1948) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A logging camp, deep in the Mexican jungle is the setting for this dark, cataclysmic drama. A man and his family go to work in a mahogany camp, only to find themselves and their coworkers treated as semi-slave laborers and the recipients of beatings and brutal punishments. Pushed to the brink of fury, the man decides the only way out for himself, and his coworkers, is for him to lead them in a violent and bloody revolt against their oppressors.

1.93GB | 1h 24m | 790×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/66D9E7E6B4504A2/Rebellion.of.the.Hanged.1954.BDRIP.576p.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English

The post Alfredo B. Crevenna & Emilio Fernández – La rebelión de los colgados AKA Rebellion of the Hanged (1954) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

In Mexican Revolution times, a guerrilla general and his troops take the conservative town of Cholula, near by Mexico City. As the revolutionaries mistreat the town’s riches, Armendáriz falls for beautiful and wild Beatriz Peñafiel, the daughter of one of the town’s richest men.

Seattle International Film Festival wrote:
“I am Mexican cinema!” director Emilio Fernández reportedly cried, and lest anyone doubt him, this loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew offers ample proof for his grandiose claim. Shot by the great cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, Enamorada stars Maria Félix (chief glory of classic Mexican cinema) as Beatriz, who resists the blandishments of boyish José Juan Reyes (Pedro Armendáriz), the swaggering revolutionary who has seized her hometown to demand its inhabitants contribute towards his cause during the 1910 uprising. Their political and romantic sparring has reminded many critics of American screwball comedy, but, as others have pointed out, when did any Hollywood heroine attempt to literally blow up her foe-who-would-be-beau? “As near to a feminist film as you’re going to get from a Catholic country in 1946…. Combining the patrician willfulness of Hepburn, the I’m-in-charge seductiveness of Gardner, and the palpitating emotionality of Garland, [Félix] is here at her peak”.

1.89GB | 1h 37m | 792×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/309790128917138/Enamorada.1946.576p.WEB.AAC.2.0.x264-SaL.mkv

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English

The post Emilio Fernández – Enamorada AKA In Love (1946) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Cardoza’s death, a candidate for mayor of a village chief enemy and Rosauro Castro, leads to Mr. Garcia Mata to undertake an investigation. Upon arriving realizes that even the whole town, including the mayor, lives in fear by the chief and only achieved revenge end the injustices committed by Rosauro Castro.

5.94GB | 1h 23m | 1920×1080 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/5E94FF53ACBFF06/Rosauro.Castro.1950.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DD+2.0.H.264-alfaHD.mkv
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Language:Spanish
Subtitles:Spanish,English

The post Roberto Gavaldón – Rosauro Castro (1950) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Dolores Del Rio plays the indigenous daughter of a prostitute, and nobody in her village will buy the flowers she sells because of her family’s sordid history. The corrupt racist local merchant whose lecherous advances she keeps turning down demands that she pay her debts in full by tomorrow or else he’ll take her beloved little piglet! It is one of two Mexican films ever to win the Palme d’Or (the other being Buñuel’s Viridiana).

Allegedly when Dolores Del Rio (hot off the heels of her relationship with Orson Welles and a successful move from Hollywood back to her native Mexico) was presented with the opportunity to play the role she replied, “You want me to play an Indian? I … barefooted?”

1.27GB | 1h 37m | 706×529 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/643F9C2AD4F3AE9/Maria_Candelaria_(1944).mkv

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English, Spanish

The post Emilio Fernández – María Candelaria (Xochimilco) (1944) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Captain Sindbad was based on an Arabian Nights story, was filmed in Germany, and starred an American leading man (Guy Williams), a German leading lady (Heidi Bruhl) and a Mexican villain (Pedro Armendariz). How’s that for cultural diversity? Anyway, the story involves Sindbad’s (Williams) efforts to enter the impenetrable castle where the evil El Kerim’s (Armendariz) heart is being kept. So long as his heart is outside his body, El Kerim is invulnerable, enabling him to be as wicked and despotic as he chooses. Sindbad comes to the rescue just seconds before the heroine (Bruhl) is about to be crushed to death by an elephant. Despite the mortality rate on both sides, Captain Sindbad is pure kiddie-matinee stuff, adroitly put together by director/cinematographer Byron (War of the Worlds) Haskin and boasting top-notch special effects. allmovie

1.28GB | 1h 25m | 853×480 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/2D934DF154A3A4C/Captain_Sindbad_(1963)_–_Byron_Haskin.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Byron Haskin – Captain Sindbad (1963) first appeared on Cinema of the World.