The son of an Illinois mortician and a former carnival huckster, Miami-based American film distributor K. Gordon Murray got his start in the film business helping to cast munchkins for The Wizard of Oz (1939). Relocated after World War II to Florida, a trade route to Latin America, Gordon began to import Mexican-made films, which he had dubbed into English for distribution in the States. Although Gordon's notoriety rests on such ghastly titles as Chano Urueta's The Brainiac (El barón del terror, 1962) and Alfonso Corona Blake's Samson and the Vampire Women (Santo vs. las mujeres vampiro, 1962), his earliest acquisitions were aimed at the kiddies. One of his earliest and most profitable finds was Cardona's disconcerting holiday morality tale Santa Claus (1959). An uncommonly lush production filmed entirely on the soundstages of Mexico City's government-run Churubusco-Azteca Studios, Santa Claus is a jaw-dropping Christmas caper that pits Kris Kringle (José Elías Moreno) against an agent of Satan known as Pitch (José Luis Aguirre), who is intent upon tarnishing the Yuletide. Dividing the action between Earth, the heavens (Santa occupies a cloud-straddling castle cum Fortress of Solitude) and deep in the bowels of Hell (where horned demons with beatnik goatees caper like Fosse dancers as the damned trudge mournfully to tarnation), Santa Claus is all the more strange for honoring a holiday not at all native to Mexico. If Cardona was thinking of potential play in North America, his gambit paid off - the film was a huge hit north of the border, where K. Gordon Murray kept it in annual rotation for nearly thirty years.
While Santa Claus' inferno sections are indebted to cinematic depictions of Hades dating back to the silents, St. Nick's anthropomorphic toyshop (whose ordinances include a Nemoesque/Phibesian pipe organ cum communication console, a privacy-violating "master eye" and an alarmingly labial computer voice generator) points to the polymorphous perversity of key 80s era "new wave" productions, notably Stephen Sayadian's Café Flesh (1982), Richard Elfman's Forbidden Zone (1982), David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983), Rene Daalder's Population: 1 (1986) and even the popular CBS Saturday morning show Pee-Wee's Playhouse (1986-1990). As pornographic, satiric, or more overtly horrific as they may be, those later projects lack the transgressive heft of the ghoulishly upbeat Santa Claus; for all its discomfiting elements and racist embroideries, Cardona's candied extravaganza was intended as family entertainment and remains all the more transgressive for the sincerity of its approach. Cardona would craft more pointedly questionable films later in his career, including the sleaze classic Night of the Bloody Apes (1969) and Survive! (1976), the first cinematic retelling of the desperation cannibalism of the 1972 Andes survivors, but Santa Claus remains the jewel in his crown. Whatever Cardona's intentions, the results speak for themselves. Ultimately it's hard to argue with Michael Weldon's assessment that Santa Claus represents "holiday exploitation at its finest."
Director: René Cardona
Producer: Guillermo Calderón
Screenplay: Adolfo Torres Portillo, René Cardona
Music: Antonio Díaz Conde
Cinematography: Raúl Martínez Solares
Editor: Jorge Bustos
Production Design: Francisco March Chillet
Choreographer: Ricardo Luna
Cast: José Elías Moreno (Santa Claus), José Luis Aguirre (Pitch), Cesáreo Quezadas (Pedro), Armando Arriola (Merlin), Ángel Di Stefani (Vulcano, the Blacksmith), Lupita Quezadas (The Poor Girl), Antonio Díaz Conde, Jr. (The Rich Boy), K. Gordon Murray (Narrator, English version). C-94m.
by Richard Harland Smith
