Cinema Revolutionary: Fernando de Fuentes in Morelia

The centerpiece of the trilogy is Godfather Mendoza (El compadre Mendoza, 1934), a darkly shaded character study that begins as a witty satire and ends as a brutal tragedy. The story opens in 1913, amid clashes between federal government forces and Zapatistas (followers of Emiliano Zapata, who led an army of peasants in a fight for land reform), but the real battlefield is the soul of Rosalío Mendoza (Alfredo del Diestro). A wealthy ranch-owner, Mendoza brazenly plays both sides of the fence, offering lavish hospitality to whichever group of soldiers rides through his gates. He hastily switches the portrait displayed in the entry hall of his hacienda, replacing Zapata with counterrevolutionary general Victoriano Huerta, then swapping them back, and presenting himself as an ardent believer in the revolution or a government loyalist, depending on who is sitting at his table or buying his armaments. He doesn’t seem like a bad man, exactly, just a cynical opportunist; he dismisses moral scruples as “romanticism and sighs,” seeing himself as a hard-nosed pragmatist, but he is also devoted to his wife and son.

Plump and sleek as a seal, Alfredo del Diestro was well-suited to embody corrupt power; he also plays the lead in Prisoner 13, the thoroughly despicable Colonel Carrasco, whose boozing, violence, and infidelity cause his wife to flee with their young son. Years later, he is the officer in charge of rounding up and executing a group of political rebels. One of the condemned men comes from a wealthy family, and his widowed mother and sister approach Carrasco to offer their fortune in exchange for his life. (“It’s a reasonable way to save a son,” the avaricious colonel shrugs.) First, the frantic women must bribe an acquaintance to take them to Carrasco; then, a banker takes advantage of their plight by forcing them to sell their property for a pittance in exchange for immediate cash. Carrasco’s only concern is how to cover up his misdeed: he orders his guards to arrest anybody—anybody at all—who bears a reasonable resemblance to the clandestinely released man. In a thundering case of poetic justice, the hapless young man who is scooped up off the streets turns out to be Carrasco’s estranged son, for whom he has long searched. Learning the truth at the last moment, he races to the execution site, his desperate sprint intercut with a long, wordless, painstakingly detailed sequence of the prisoners being marched out and lined up against a stained and pockmarked wall. The camera pans first along the line of doomed men, then along the soldiers in the firing squad with their guns raised.

Military leaders objected to the film’s portrayal of such venal conduct, and so a new ending was tacked on, resorting to the oldest of chestnuts: “it was all a dream!” The splice is so obvious that it can’t conceal the thrust of this schematic yet potent tale, in which a man’s solitary decent impulse shatters his complacent amorality. Prisoner 13 introduces several of de Fuentes’s signatures, like his fondness for lap dissolves and rhyming cuts. Sometimes these are simply visual matches that bridge scenes, for instance a cut from the hands of a telegraph operator punching out a message to those of a woman patting tortillas between her palms. Sometimes the dissolves create links between people separated by space or by antagonism: a shot of Carrasco melts into one of his wife after she has left him, and (in the next film) a column of federal troops riding out of Mendoza’s ranch dissolves into a column of Zapatistas riding in. Sometimes we are carried forward through time in a brisk series of cuts, watching a child age in leaps and bounds. These stylistic grace notes always serve the momentum of the story.

For the most part Villa is depicted as a good leader, but he is peripheral to the six friends, the self-proclaimed “Lions of San Pablo.” The early parts of the film blend comic camaraderie with sweeping tableaux of bustling camps and steam trains swarming with soldiers. Some of the expensive, naturalistic battle scenes were reused in later films by other directors, establishing an iconography of the revolution. Operating the camera was a young Gabriel Figueroa, who would make his debut as director of photography with Out on the Big Ranch and become one of the most revered of all cinematographers, known for his lustrous, dramatic chiaroscuro and the sculptural solidity of his images.

The “Lions” collect spoils and flaunt their fearless virility, as when one lassos a machine gun on horseback. But they are killed off one by one, and their deaths progress from the plausibly glorious to the distressingly pointless. Captured by the enemy and sentenced to be hanged, they face their fate with almost ludicrous nonchalance, but when they are rescued at the last moment, the film pauses to note the death of the extremely young officer in charge of the execution, whose fresh-faced innocence they had mocked. Celebrating in a cantina packed with drunken revelers, they agree to a Russian-roulette-style game in which a loaded pistol is tossed into the air. It serves absolutely no purpose except to prove their willingness to gamble with their lives; in thrall to the cult of machismo, a man dies for nothing. The scene is masterfully staged and lit, with a circular pan around the table taking in the faces of men who know they are doing something stupid but cannot back out.

It is a long way from the swaggering antics of the opening to the bitter ending, in which the youngest of the Lions contracts smallpox, and his friend Tiburcio (Frausto again) is ordered to dispatch him and burn his body and belongings. Though appalled, he does as he’s told, and when he hears the trumpet sounding for the troop train to set off, a close-up shows him saluting, his face alight with fervid obedience. He is still a believer, but as a possible carrier of infection he is expelled from the group, and a beautiful closing shot sees him walking alone down the railroad tracks, vanishing into the night as the engine of history steams off in the opposite direction.

Alongside these realistic treatments of recent history, de Fuentes created more stylized encounters with Mexico’s past and traditions, in extreme shades of dark and light. He helped shape a distinctive Mexican take on the horror film, cowriting the country’s first entry in that genre of the sound era, La llorona (1933). Directed by Ramón Peón, it drew on the folk legend of a ghostly “weeping woman” and on the historical figure of La Malinche, an Indigenous woman who helped Hernán Cortés in his conquest of the Aztecs. After the success of this film, de Fuentes directed The Phantom of the Monastery (El fantasma del convento), which he cowrote with Jorge Pezet and filmmaker Juan Bustillo Oro. Like La llorona, it confronts modern skeptics with an ancient curse, while following the classic template of stranded travelers spending the night in a sinister residence.

A married couple, Cristina and Eduardo (Marta Roel and Carlos Villatoro), get lost while hiking in the mountains with their friend Alfonso (Enrique del Campo), and seek refuge in a monastery they believe to be an abandoned ruin. Led there by a mysterious cloaked man and his dog named Shadow, they find it inhabited by the Brothers of Silence, a penitent order of monks. “How can such an order exist in this day and age?” the young urbanites keep asking. Cristina adds, “It feels as though we were outside time and place.” Phantom was filmed on location in a monastery in Tepotzotlán, and no set could match the spooky grandeur of this building with its maze of windowless corridors, twisting stone stairs, and baroque chapels festooned with shadows. A restoration by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project brings out the details of cobwebs, dust, rust, abraded stone, and the painterly chiaroscuro of cinematographer Ross Fisher. The camera prowls around cells and hallways; slow pans linger over coffins, crumbling books, and the beautiful, wizened faces of the monks, who might have stepped out of the paintings of Francisco de Zurbarán. Offscreen sounds thicken the atmosphere: a whimpering moan behind a locked door, a keening wind, an ominous thumping.

At dinner, the gaunt prior explains that the monastery is cursed because of a monk named Rodrigo, who before coming there had lusted after his best friend’s wife and summoned the devil’s aid, leading to his friend’s death. Rodrigo’s tormented soul cannot rest, and his corpse keeps returning to his sealed-off cell. It happens that Cristina and Alfonso share an adulterous passion, and Alfonso seems poised to repeat Rodrigo’s sin. But as this parable of fleshly temptation plays out, it is the monks who leave the deepest impression: mute in their dark hooded robes, they are both eerie and hauntingly sad, with the weariness of the undead whose food is ashes.

In these films of the 1930s, women are mostly kept in their place as mothers, sisters, wives, and sweethearts. Tough or bossy women are caricatured as shrews in need of taming. But in 1943, de Fuentes helped launch the career of the woman who would come to be known as “the queen of Mexico,” “the devourer of men,” and simply, “la Doña”: María Félix. She exploded into stardom playing the title role in Doña Bárbara, adapted from a Venezuelan novel by Rómulo Gallegos about a woman who owns a vast swath of the plains and rules it like a pirate queen, feared for her ruthlessness and power over men. Félix sells this character the moment she appears dressed like a gaucho, regal and rakish, every small gesture eloquent with pride and disdain. Even before we meet her, she is supplied with a backstory that explains her contempt for men and coldhearted hunger for power: as an innocent teenager she was gang-raped by sailors who killed the man she loved.

We are thus primed to enjoy watching Doña Barbara take her revenge and dominate her surroundings. Unfortunately, we hear about her more than we see her, and the film revolves instead around Santos Luzardo (Julián Soler), a man who returns to his ranch after years in a city, determined to bring civilization and progress to the wild plains. Bland and tediously upstanding, he remains impervious to Barbara’s wiles, breaks her grip on the region, and transforms her neglected, uneducated daughter into a proper young lady. Tipping its hand, the story portrays Barbara as relying on occult forces to work her will, keeping an altar in her bedroom where she casts spells on men. Why would she need to? The witchcraft element not only demonizes her—literally—but ignores the fact that Maria Félix had all the sorcery she needed in a cocked eyebrow. The film suffers when she is offscreen, though it is gorgeously filmed by Alex Phillips, who captures brooding cloudscapes over vast flat plains and marshy rivers.

It is not hard to understand the enormous popularity of Out on the Big Ranch, which spawned a series of spin-offs and a 1949 remake also directed by de Fuentes. Comedy and melodrama jostle together amid songs, dances, and festive rituals. The delighted laughter of the largely Mexican audience in Morelia, which spanned all ages, was proof that the film has lost none of its power to connect with people. Crowd-pleasing is usually a slur, but here was proof that it need not be. (While there is nothing overtly political about the film’s populism, the nostalgic portrait of ranch life is peppered with offhand references to communism, from an accusation flung at the boss that “you at Rancho Grande are capitalists exploiting our people” to a buffoonish Galician shopkeeper’s assertion that he is “communist, soviet, and atheist by the grace of god.”)

Music is the biggest source of the film’s charm. The plot is frequently cast aside for songs: the irresistibly catchy title tune, yearning love ballads sung to filigreed guitar parts, improvised lyrical duels in which singers compete to best and insult each other. José Francisco, the virtuous hero, is played by Tito Guízar, who had international success in the 1930s as a performer of Mexican popular songs, including Carnegie Hall concerts, his own radio program in Los Angeles, and appearances in Hollywood movies. With his opera-trained tenor and matinee-idol looks, he is hardly convincing as an ordinary charro, but the film manages to balance artifice and spectacle with natural landscapes and an organic feel of dust and sun and adobe and cows. De Fuentes’s use of expansive locations is so effortless that it’s easy to forget how rarely Hollywood films of the early-to-mid-1930s left the confines of studio backlots and soundstages. The plein-air freshness and exuberant crowds of extras give Out on the Big Ranch its warmth and vivacity. Its love for the folk traditions it celebrates is infectious, and it finally embraces all of its characters in a vision of forgiveness and harmony, crowned with a quadruple wedding amid a sea of jubilant villagers. When the tune is so sweet, what can you do but join the crowd and sing along?