This Month

6 Movies / September 20

To celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month, TCM is proud to present an evening of films from the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, an extended period from 1930 to 1969 when the country’s film industry had its highest production output, quality and financial success. The line-up features several of the biggest stars of the time – including one Mexican actor who made it big in Hollywood – and two films by one of the most notable artists in world cinema history.

Ninón Sevilla (1921-2015) was a Cuban-born dancer who first became known for her cabaret performances in notably eccentric costumes and hairstyles before making her film debut in 1947. She quickly rose to become a renowned sex symbol and icon of the “rumbera,” a familiar archetype of Mexican musicals. The character was most often a “bad girl” who is redeemed by dancing. In Víctimas del pecado/Victims of Sin (1951), she is a cabaret dancer who decides to defy her criminal boss and raise a baby she has rescued from a garbage can. LÍevame en tus brazos/Take Me in Your Arms (1954) casts her as a poor fisherman’s daughter who sacrifices her future to save her father and sister. Sevilla was a big enough star to demand her favorite cameraman, Gabriel Figueroa (an Academy Award nominee for The Night of the Iguana, 1964) for both pictures.

Mexican native Ricardo Montalban (1920-2009), known later in his career as the evil Khan of the Star Trek movie franchise, was already established in Hollywood when he traveled home for Sombra verde/Untouched (1954), the story of a scientist lost in the jungle who finds himself in a strange, erotic-romantic entanglement. It was directed by multi-Ariel Award (the Mexican cinema equivalent to the Academy Awards) winner Roberto Gavaldón, whose many films have been considered among the best of the country’s Golden Age output.

René Cardona (1905-1988) was another of the period’s most successful director and actor. With an outstanding number of credits to his name, Cardona directed and starred in more than 250 films! He directed many of the popular Santo films, starring famed-masked Mexican wrestler Santo. Cardona’s crime drama, Puerto de tentación (1951), about a cabaret singer who falls for the man she rescues, is heavily influenced by the style of American film noir.

The evening’s programming concludes with a double feature that’s well worth staying up for (or rising early). Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) was born in Spain and started his career in France with such surrealist masterpieces as Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age d’Or (1930). A true maverick and visionary with a number of films regularly included in critics’ polls of the greatest all-time works of world cinema, he worked in France, Spain and the U.S. before finding himself in Mexico, where he made 14 films in quick succession between 1947 and 1955. One of these, Ensayo de un crimen/The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955), follows the bizarre story of a would-be killer who never carries through on any of his planned murders but whose intended victims die anyway as a result of his actions.

The controversial short (45 minutes) Simon of the Desert (1965), a wicked religious satire, was one of two films Buñuel made in Mexico in the 1960s, along with the surreal classic The Exterminating Angel (1962). This tale of a devout ascetic tempted by the Devil (Buñuel regular and Mexican Golden Age star Silvia Pinal) was the final film the director made in that country.