Lincoln Center Offers Roberto Gavaldón’s Mexico

Mexican cinema would be hard to imagine without Roberto Gavaldón. Born in 1909 in the state of Chihuahua, Gavaldón worked his way up through the industry, beginning in the late 1920s as an editor, actor, and assistant. Between 1946 and 1980, he directed 50 films. Then, for the most part, he faded into obscurity.That’s unfortunate, since Gavaldón possessed a true populist touch and a well-rounded sense of how to construct robust, emotionally charged stories in a variety of genres. His work was enhanced by savvy choices of collaborators, including the novelists Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez, the great cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, and the mysterious writer B. Traven (author of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”), whose stories inspired a trilogy of Gavaldón’s films. Gavaldón also made a tearjerker children’s film for Disney, “The Littlest Outlaw” (1955), about a boy who steals a horse in order to save it from an evil trainer. And he made potent melodramas such as “The Other One” (1946), starring a middle-age Dolores del Rio as a woman who kills her twin sister in order to assume her identity and millionaire lifestyle, only to make some surprising discoveries.Beginning Friday, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will round up nine of Gavaldón’s best films in a weeklong retrospective that is consistently eye-opening.“Mexican cinema is something that is sort of there but still sort of unknown,” the program’s curator and the director of the New York Film Festival, Richard Peña, said. “There’s lots left to discover.”Gavaldón’s films are, perhaps, at the top of the list for fresh appreciation. But like much of the vintage output of the Mexican film industry, Mr. Peña said, they are privately controlled. This makes them harder to acquire, because of messy situations involving rights to usage. On a different front, films such as “Night Falls” (1952), about a cocksure jai-alai champion whose footloose way with the ladies gets him blackmailed, are like classic Hollywood B movies. As Mr. Peña suggested, American fans of Mexican cinema tend to certain pockets. Everyone knows the movies Luis Buñuel made there, even the formerly obscure ones. And cult-film enthusiasts have for decades celebrated the romps starring masked wrestlers — the so-called lucha libre and its greatest hero, El Santo.“It’s a cinema we know and we don’t know,” Mr. Peña noted. “And people have tended to be attracted to a certain burlesque quality.”The quality that defines Gavaldón’s work is quality itself. “Night Falls,” for instance, is a beautifully shot, crisply executed drama in which the philandering jai-alai hero Marco (Pedro Armendáriz) impregnates one of his girlfriends, then takes the heat when her angry brother uses the information to force him into throwing a match. Marco defies the mob, at considerable peril. With its elegant nightclub sequences and tough-guy locker-room jousting, duplicitous sweet talk and lethal glares, the film emanates an authentically pulpy aura. But the frequent night photography also creates a dreamier ambience that gets into the viewer’s head — not just under the nails.As his affinity for the leftist Traven indicated, Gavaldón consistently incorporated strong social themes into his work. “Rosa Blanca” (1961), which went unreleased until 1972, adapts a Traven story about a farmer who refuses to sell his land for use in the Mexican oil boom. The theme feels remarkably resonant today, as the subject of offshore drilling becomes one of the prevailing topics of the presidential race.More mythologically, “Macario” (1960), also based on a Traven story, translates a Brothers Grimm fable to the rugged landscape of colonial Mexico. There, a poor family man named Macario (Ignacio López Tarso) ventures into a forest to feast on a turkey that his long-suffering wife has stolen for him. He is visited by colorful manifestations of the Devil (a bandito), God (a white-bearded lord), and, finally, Death (gaunt and dark-robed), each seeking to share his bounty. Macario takes mercy on Death and agrees to split his turkey in half, for which Death rewards him with a healing potion.The fable, shot by Figueroa in gorgeous, supple black and white, traces the rise and fall of Macario the healer, whose magic gifts are exploited by a greedy patron and incur the wrath of the Catholic Church, which brands him a brujo and, as fate would have it, condemns him to be burned alive. Or is it all a dream? Mr. Tarso’s performance, as a humble everyman whose wishes come true only to bring him woe, often tilts to the slyly comic. The film, for all its profound airs, ultimately succeeds as a well-drawn send-up of Mexican archetypes and the perpetual quirks of the human condition.Wounded Pride, Simmering Passion: Roberto Gavaldón runs through Thursday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (70 Lincoln Center Plaza, at Broadway at West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).

Lincoln Center Offers Roberto Gavaldón’s Mexico

Lincoln Center Offers Roberto Gavaldón’s Mexico

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