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...movies. The "Colecció n Pedro Infante -Edició n de Homenaje" (Warner Home Video, all titles sold separately) not only clued me in to one of the major stars of Mexico's midcentury; it opened a window on the most vital, teeming movie industry south of Hollywood...
...Infante was an ornament of Mexico's Golden Age (La é poca de Oro del Cine Mejicano), a two-decade stretch of potent moviemaking. While the U.S. industry was importing Latin Americans like Ricardo Montalban, Carmen Miranda, José Iturbi and Fernando Lamas, Mexican beauty Dolores del Rio left Hollywood and returned home to join such new stars as Cantinflas, Pedro Armend?riz, Mar?a Félix and Infante's friendly rival in the singing hunk sweepstakes, Jorge Negrete. Emilio "El Indio" Fern?ndez was directing movies that won international prizes, like the Cannes Palme d'Or. A renegade from Franco...
...Mexico was like Hollywood, or like India today: a national industry heavily invested in the romantic and domestic weepie, with fearless emoting, hairpin turns of fate, mega-doses of religious and family piety, all set to the popular songs of the day. (Melodrama literally means music drama.) Noble mothers are forever sacrificing themselves -silently, stoically, suicidally -for their kids. Fully three of the 10 Infante features end with some spiteful young person driving some dear old person to death, only to be flattened with a shocking revelation: "She's / he's your mother / father!" Cue tears that would flood...
...Mexico had a race problem. With plentiful intermarrying between the indigenous population and the descendants of Spanish emigrés, the country was its own rainbow coalition, or contradiction. Most of the movie stars were light-skinned; those that weren't often played comic or villainous relief. But unlike Hollywood, Mexico didn't ignore the race issue. And in Joselito Rodriguez' Angelitos Negros (Little Black Angels), the prejudice of the invaders toward the natives, or anyone with native blood, is crucial, poignant and bizarre. Its script, by Rogelio A. González (from a play by the Cuban Felix...
...There were supposedly discussions about his coming to Hollywood. But those and all other dreams were cut short when he died. Or did he? In the myth of the hero, death is often only a pause before resurrection. "Some say Pedro Infante still lives," Chavéz writes. "Some say he was killed in the plane crash. Some say the left side of his face was mutilated and that he now lives in hiding (age 87) in the Sierra Nevadas. Some say he was having an affair with the President of Mexico's mistress and the Mexican mafia was after...