1934 was a big year for the Mexican film industry. The ambitious Fernando de Fuentes and Juan Bustillo Oro collaborated on the revolution tale El compadre Mendoza but separately made a pair of well-remembered horror films. De Fuentes directed El fantasma del convento, and Oro co-wrote and directed Dos Monjes (Two Monks), an expressionist classic ripe with cinematic ideas.
In a forbidding monastery, two monks must explain themselves to a superior after one tries to kill the other. They tell conflicting versions of their romantic competition for the love of a beautiful woman, Anita (Magda Haller). Javier (Carlos Villatoro) was a sickly composer when he fell in love with Anita, but his close friend Juan (Victor Urruchúa) naturally desired Anita for himself. The rivalry turned ugly and led to a tragedy.
Director Oro styled Dos Monjes after the expressionist works of F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang and Robert Weiner, making use of distorted sets, tilted camera angles and chiaroscuro lighting patterns. The monastery is a tomb of dark hallways and strange statuary. Javier first sees his coveted Anita through a twisted window. But Oro's main innovation predates Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950): dual flashbacks repeat the tragedy as told in Javier and Juan's contradictory testimonies. Not only do the men tell wildly subjective accounts, each is visually stylized to exonerate themself and demonize the other. For a nightmarish finale Javier hallucinates being pursued by his fellow monks, who now have weird ghoulish faces.
Oro's cameraman Agustín Jiménez was a high-art photographer shooting his first movie; the post-revolutionary sculptor Germán Cueto designed the masks for the horror conclusion. Oro also constructed a crane for high-angled shots, a first for a Mexican film. Critics remarked on Dos Monjes' dreamlike, surreal quality, but Mexican audiences preferred less abstract entertainments like De Fuentes's smash musical hit Allá en el Rancho Grande (1936). Juan Bustillo Oro enjoyed a long career in more conventional comedies and dramas, including one of the earliest hits starring Mexico's beloved comedian Cantinflas.
by Glenn Erickson
