October 5th and 12th | 10 films
The U.S.-Mexican border has long drawn the attention of filmmakers, spanning Hollywood westerns and melodramas to independent productions that delve into the plight of immigrants. A night of five varied films from five decades shines a spotlight into this world, and a second night of five films celebrates a Puerto Rican film artist who succeeded both in front of and behind the camera: José Ferrer.
In Bordertown (1935), a Warner Bros. melodrama, Paul Muni plays a night-school-educated Mexican-American lawyer from a squalid neighborhood of Los Angeles. Disbarred after an outburst of temper, he travels south of the border to become the manager of a Mexican casino run by Eugene Pallette, whose emotionally unhinged wife (Bette Davis) makes fruitless advances on him. Muni was Warner Bros.’ top star in these years, and the film drew much attention. “[He] is a Mexican this time,” said Variety, “and does it as realistically and effectively as he has done Italian and other characterizations in the past.” Bordertown, however, wound up drawing even more attention to Bette Davis, who was not a star at the time of filming but became one before the movie opened, thanks to her turn in Of Human Bondage (1934). As a result, what had been “a Paul Muni film” turned into “Bette Davis’s new film,” much to Muni’s consternation. Variety declared: “Bette Davis equals, if not betters, her characterization in Of Human Bondage.”
Border Incident (1949), a dark, gripping film noir about illegal immigration on the Mexican border, was produced by the unlikely studio of MGM, whose new production chief, Dore Schary, had an eye for topical, socially conscious material. Brilliantly directed by Anthony Mann and shot by legendary cinematographer John Alton, Border Incident depicts the plight of illegal immigrants, the ruthless cruelty of their smugglers and the crime genre dramatics of the agents, one American and one Mexican, assigned to infiltrate and expose the smuggling ring. Both agents were played by stars going against type. George Murphy, as the American, had become a star thanks to romantic films and musicals. Ricardo Montalban, the Mexican, had been built up by MGM as a Latin lover, and this was a successful attempt to break away from that image with a gritty drama. Also in the cast is Alfonso Bedoya, famed for having played the bandit in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1947) who tells Humphrey Bogart, “I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!” Bedoya made over 40 films in Mexico as a character actor in the 1930s and 40s before Treasure brought him to Hollywood, and he acted in a dozen more pictures before his death in 1957.
In Border Treasure (1950), an amiable RKO B western shot in scenic Lone Pine, Calif., Tim Holt and his frequent sidekick Chito (Richard Martin) agree to protect a rancher’s mule train delivering money and silver to south-of-the-border victims of a Mexican earthquake—an operation that catches the eye of a gang of crooks. Holt acted in 46 B westerns over the years, rarely venturing into the A world of big budget movies, not for lack of talent but simply because he enjoyed making these quick westerns. Martin played Chito in the last 29 of those 46 titles, all made after the war, though he had first played the character, a Mexican ladies’ man, in 1943’s Bombardier. In a sign of how ethnic casting has changed, the trade paper Motion Picture Herald predicted that the Spokane-born Martin was “bound to appeal to the Latin American communities.”
With The Wild Bunch, maverick director Sam Peckinpah took the “Mexico western” subgenre and turned out a touchstone of Hollywood cinema. Like many Mexico westerns of the era, the film reflected the turbulence and messiness of America’s war in Vietnam, but Peckinpah went further and stylized his scenes of violence to an unheard-of degree, with incredible, drawn-out scenes of balletic, slow-motion (and bloody) deaths and endless bullets. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) had also featured the slow-motion technique for its violent scenes, but The Wild Bunch took it to a relentless new level that has influenced countless filmmakers ever since. To cite one example of the painstaking process of depicting a massive gunfight, the film’s Aqua Verde sequence, in which the Wild Bunch opens fire on the Mexican criminal boss Mapache and his troops, took 32 days to film, using 300 extras and more than 500 animals.
Attacked from many quarters for the unflinching screen violence, Peckinpah was unfazed. “Actually, it’s an anti-violence film,” he said, “because I use violence as it is. It’s ugly, brutalizing and bloody awful. It’s not fun and games, and cowboys and Indians; it’s a terrible, ugly thing. And yet there’s a certain response that you get from it, an excitement because we’re all violent people, we have violence within us. Violence is part of life and I don't think we can bury our heads in the sand and ignore it.” The story centers on a group of aging cowboys looking for one last score in a corrupt border town, while pursued by a rival gang. Among the multiethnic cast are Jaime Sanchez, a rising Puerto Rican actor, as Angel, the group’s only Mexican member, and the renowned Mexican actor-director Emilio Fernandez as Mapache. Peckinpah said it was Fernandez who gave him the idea for the opening sequence of children killing scorpions with ants. Fernandez told him, “You know, the Wild Bunch, when they go into the town like that, are like when I was a child and we would take a scorpion and drop it on an anthill.”
In 1983, young filmmaker Gregory Nava directed the indie darling El Norte, which he and his wife, Anna Thomas, had written after attending UCLA film school. Born in San Diego, Nava was Mexican, with family on both sides of the border, and he had long been struck by the contrast between San Diego, the prosperous American city to the north (“el norte”) and the cardboard shacks of Tijuana. He used that divide to come up with a story of two Guatemalan teenage siblings who steal across the border for a new life in America. Produced independently on a small budget and shot on remote Mexican locations, it opened to universal acclaim and became an arthouse hit. According to author Luis Reyes, “it was one of the first films to portray a contemporary Central American immigrant journey from their point of view.” Nava and Thomas steered clear of Hollywood studios with this project, assuming that a studio would demand too many changes to their vision. After about two years, they secured funding from a combination of PBS and foreign pre-sales. They were rewarded with critical acclaim, screenings at such prestigious festivals as Telluride and Cannes, and an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. The New York Times critic Vincent Canby noted, “Mr. Nava does not patronize his ‘little people.’ This has something to do with the straight, unactorly quality of the performances, especially by Zaide Silvia Gutierrez as Rosa and David Villalpando as Enrique, two splendid Mexican actors.” Fellow critic Roger Ebert went so far as to deem the film “a Grapes of Wrath for our time.”
The second night of films is devoted to José Ferrer (born José Vicente Ferrer Otero y Cintrón), a native Puerto Rican with a beautiful voice who became one of the most renowned stage and screen actors in mid-twentieth-century America, and also directed seven films between 1955-1962. After starring in 300 performances of the 1946 Broadway smash hit “Cyrano de Bergerac,” for which he won a Tony Award as Best Actor, Ferrer made his film debut alongside Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc (1948), for which he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. Two years later he brought his Cyrano to the screen in a low-budget black-and-white film version, Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), produced by Stanley Kramer, directed by Michael Gordon, and shot in 24 days. While a stagy film, Ferrer’s performance was dynamic, and the ending brought real tears not only to the audience but to his Roxane, played by Mala Powers. Ferrer later said that to create such a realistic death onscreen, he skipped two meals. “I learned long ago that hunger and yearning produce the same look on a man’s face. When I want to make an audience weep, I just starve myself to death.” With Cyrano, Ferrer became the first Latino to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. He phoned in his acceptance speech from New York, where he was starring in another Broadway show.
1950, in fact, had been an amazingly busy year for him, with four Broadway plays that he produced, directed or acted in, as well as several roles in movies, one of which was Crisis (1950). Here he is charmingly sinister as a bald, bearded, Latin American dictator whom brain surgeon Cary Grant is forced to operate on while the (unnamed) country is on the verge of revolution. For three of the Spanish-speaking roles in the film, Grant successfully campaigned for the casting of Ramon Navarro, Gilbert Roland and Antonio Moreno, all former silent stars. Directed by Richard Brooks in his directorial debut, and released by MGM, Crisis drew good reviews but fell short at the box office.
For John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (1952), Ferrer received yet another Academy Award nomination, for playing both Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and his father. Huston had been interested in making a film of the painter’s life and contacted Ferrer about playing him. Ironically, Ferrer had already optioned the rights to Pierre La Mure’s novel to develop it into a play. The pair teamed up and worked together to create a fuller screen portrait of the character in the novel, with Huston using Marcel Vertès’ costumes and Oswald Morris’s lighting to evoke nineteenth-century France to beautiful effect. The result garnered seven Oscar nominations, with wins for costumes and art direction. It was a grueling production for Ferrer, who went to great pains to achieve a physical likeness to the character, who in real life had suffered from a congenital bone disease that stunted his growth to under five feet; the top of his body developed into adulthood but his legs did not. The six-foot-tall Ferrer bent his knees and relaxed his legs for medium and close shots, while for long shots his legs were strapped behind him as he walked on his knees. This necessitated frequent breaks for Ferrer’s legs to be massaged to restore circulation.
According to historian Luis Reyes, I Accuse! (1958) stands as Ferrer’s best directorial effort. It’s an account of the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish officer of the French army was wrongfully accused and convicted of treason in 1894 and sent to Devil’s Island, sparking outrage from citizens including esteemed writer Emile Zola, who penned a famous editorial against the anti-Semitic French government entitled “I Accuse!” Dreyfus is ultimately exonerated, but only after two trials that result in guilty verdicts despite the government knowing that he was innocent. With his portrayal of Dreyfus, Reyes wrote, Ferrer “proved he could portray the widest possible range of characters, usually non-Latin ones.”
The same year, Ferrer starred in and directed another film, MGM’s satirical The High Cost of Loving (1958), in which he plays a man, Jim Fry, who believes he is about to be let go by the company where he has worked for 15 years as a cog in the machine. The same day, he learns his wife (Gena Rowlands, in her film debut), is pregnant. In a superb 10-minute opening sequence, wordless and without music, husband and wife go through their morning routines—bathing, dressing and eating breakfast—before finally breaking their silence. As Variety said of this scene, “it is very funny, and is expert use of motion picture techniques.” The Hollywood Reporter declared, “Ferrer is as fine in this gem as he’s ever been... Like all good comedies, this is funny about something. Embedded in its structure is much sound social commentary, no less valid because it does not end tragically.”
