Bright Lights, Dark Dreams: Alejandro Galindo in Morelia

At the center of the film is Maru (Martha Roth), about to turn fifteen and celebrate her quinceañera. Lively and restless, she still lives in fear of her stern, narrow-minded father, who plans to marry her off to a stuffy cousin from the country. Her birthday party is a magnificently layered and complex sequence, arcing from frenzied excitement to aching disappointment, warmed by familial tenderness but ending with a harsh paternal scolding. After passing through the bedroom window at the beginning, the camera never leaves the house, or even glances out another window, for about two-thirds of the film. You start to feel that you cannot breathe. Maru’s older brother is forced into a shotgun wedding with his pregnant girlfriend. Her older sister is caught kissing her fiancé, and the family stands around in helpless horror as her father beats her savagely behind a closed door. The first breath of fresh air enters this stifled household with the arrival of Roberto (David Silva), a fast-talking salesman from the “Bright Home Corporation,” who introduces a vacuum cleaner, then a refrigerator, and some dangerously modern ideas, like friendship between husbands and wives, and between parents and children. As Maru begins secretly meeting Roberto, the camera finally ventures with her out into the street, and the tiny move feels momentous. Throughout the richly satisfying final scenes, as Maru and her mother finally stand up to the patriarch, the young Mexican audience in Morelia went bananas.

The tyrannical father in Una familia has a female counterpart in the title character of Doña Perfecta (1951), a wealthy and powerful widow played with deliciously stylized villainy by Dolores del Río. Adapting a Spanish novel by Benito Pérez Galdós, Galindo moves the action to nineteenth-century Mexico, during a period of conflict between a liberal government and entrenched conservative and ecclesiastical interests. Doña Perfecta’s iron grip on her family and village is menaced by the arrival of her nephew, a freethinking man of science who reveals her self-serving intolerance and hypocritical piety. Encased in high-necked black gowns, del Río stalks through the movie like the evil queen in a fairy tale, her icily flawless beauty hardening into a mask of fanatical rigidity. The story lacks subtlety, but gets better as it grows even less subtle, building to a furiously melodramatic climax complete with a raging storm—pelting rain, gusty wind, shudders of lightning, violent death, and tragedy for everyone involved.

This small-town period drama is an outlier in a body of work sharply attuned to the social landscape of the Alemán era. The 1946–1952 presidency of Miguel Alemán Valdés was a time of rapid modernization, industrialization, and migration to cities; the economic “miracle” of prosperity was tainted by corruption and inequality. Ambition and money-lust course through Galindo’s films like some toxic drug in the water system. Los dineros del diablo (The Devil’s Money, 1953) and Los Fernández de Peralvillo (1954) both trace the downfalls of honest men, relentlessly humiliated by poverty, who finally take the easy route to wealth and end up stranded in a wasteland of cynicism, loneliness, and self-loathing. In the latter film, the protagonist, Mario Fernández (Víctor Parra), is a failing door-to-door salesman, peddling blenders in modern high-rises and returning home to the squalid, dirt-road neighborhood of Peralvillo, where he lives with his saintly mother and bickering, contemptuous sisters. Feeling worthless and resentful, he signs on with an old friend who works for a shady corporation selling fraudulent medicines for huge profits. Soon he is driving a Cadillac and living in a sleek mansion, with a high-society wife who only married him so that she would be freer to meet her lover. The great cinematographer Alex Phillips captures the chilly gleam and cavernous emptiness of the villa, where in a painfully extended scene Mario—having betrayed or alienated everyone close to him—is reduced to asking his butler to have a drink with him, and being turned down. Returning to Peralvillo in the rain (Galindo loves dark and stormy nights), he learns in the bluntest way that you can’t go home again.

A bitter refrain runs through the films: money is everything—if you have it, you are respected and decent; if you don’t, you are nothing. People say things like: “Money has no ethics or religion.” “Shame is a luxury.” “Honesty is measured in how much money you have.” “Thieves are never in jail. Jail is for the poor.” “Every single peso is stained with blood—as long as it’s not yours!”

Galindo worked with a stock company of actors, reshuffling them in film after film. David Silva and Víctor Parra face off repeatedly, starting in Campeón sin corona (Champion Without a Crown, 1946), a boxing movie that adds acute psychological insight to the usual attractions of the genre. Silva has the looks of an everyman, and his roles range from the charming mensch of Una familia de tantas to the arrogant bastard of Hay lugar para dos (There’s Room for Two, 1949), a cocky bus driver who ditches his devoted wife for a sultry temptress (Katy Jurado) and recklessly causes a fatal accident. In Campéon, he is Roberto “Kid” Terranova, a belligerent ice-cream vendor whose constant brawls get him recruited into the ring, where nothing can stop his meteoric rise except his own weakness of character. An Americanized Mexican boxer (Parra) who speaks English, and has a blonde gringa girlfriend, gives Roberto such an inferiority complex that he crumples helplessly during a bout. He is seduced by a slumming society woman, and cracks up when she quickly tires of him and casts him off. The film abounds with raffish, pungent flavor—street markets, taco stands, pool halls, and rowdy crowds who pelt disappointing fighters with litter—but at the heart is an unblinking portrait of machismo as a poison destroying its host from within.

The theme of Mexico’s relationship with its northern neighbor is more fully explored in Espaldas mojadas (Wetbacks, 1955), in which Silva plays Rafael, a man on the run from the law who crosses the border and discovers the bitter fate of undocumented migrants, condemned to exploitation and loneliness in a strange land. He encounters rapacious smugglers and bosses, a philosophical hobo, a Mexican American woman who laments her fate caught between two countries, and a fatally injured bracero who asks to be thrown into the river so the current will carry him back to his native land. The film’s episodic, plotless drift mirrors the migrants’ lives in limbo, caught in an endless cycle of menial jobs, meager pay, threats, and flight. At one point, Rafael works on a railroad gang lining track in the desert, under the lash of a nasty, racist foreman (a bleached-blond Parra). During a break the workers flop down under or alongside the train cars amid drying laundry and tin cans: a slow traveling shot finds them playing cards, swigging booze, singing sad songs about exile, and waiting in line for their turn with a truckload of sex workers driven out to their camp. Though the film ends on a hopeful note for Rafael, what lingers is the still-current vision of desperate men braving the cold waters of the Rio Grande and the machine guns of border guards to chase a mirage of prosperity.

Galindo’s films give North American audiences a chance to see the United States through Mexican eyes—and it’s not a pretty sight. (The director spent time in Hollywood during the 1920s, getting his start in the film industry working for Famous Players, later Paramount.) The festival in Morelia also has a tradition of showcasing views of its own country by foreign filmmakers, through the “Imaginary Mexico” strand, a concept first proposed by the late Bertrand Tavernier. This year the section took an actor-as-auteur approach, with a quartet of films curated by Nick James in which Robert Mitchum, the eternal drifter and fugitive, rambles south of the border. Sometimes this Mexico is constructed on Hollywood backlots, like the moonlit beaches and smoky cantinas of Acapulco in the sublime noir Out of the Past, or the kitschy luxury resort where His Kind of Woman’s absurdist drama unfolds like a sunstroke victim lapsing into delirium. Sometimes it is the real thing, like the windblown, lonesome borderlands in The Wonderful Country, haunted by men without homes; or the sun-soaked towns and landscapes of The Big Steal, where bemused locals observe the crazy antics of gringos chasing each other with guns and suitcases of cash, and Mitchum and Jane Greer turn the comic chase thriller into a movie-long duet of dry, affectionate, one-upping banter.

Two restorations presented in partnership with Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival continued the theme of Mexico viewed by outsiders. The Argentine director Hugo Fregonese’s Hollywood film One Way Street (1950) strands a cynical mob doctor (James Mason), fleeing with a bag of stolen loot and his boss’s girlfriend, in a stereotypical Mexican village where he lounges in white linen peasant garb and gradually recovers his humanity. These Hollywood films blithely envision Mexico as a perilous vacation paradise or a charmingly primitive refuge from modern life—in glaring contrast to Galindo’s portraits of a turbulently evolving urban society. The other restoration (from The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, Les Films du Camélia, and Cineteca di Bologna) was a different beast entirely: Luis Buñuel’s mind-blowing Él (This Strange Passion, 1953), one of the twenty-one films the Spanish director made in Mexico, this one adapted with Luis Alcoriza from the autobiographical novel by Mercedes Pinto, and shot by the peerless Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa.