Word: pedro
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Pedro, the proletarian man of honor, usually bears injustice bravely. Sometimes he volunteers for public censure, taking the rap for a crime of passion his sister committed in Las Islas Marias. Sometimes he's railroaded into jail by a scheming rival, as in Nosotros los pobres...! Only rarely, as in The Woman I Lost, does he take up arms against the corrupting power. On the run for an accidental killing the police think is murder, he becomes a Robin Hood of the countryside, reappropriating the money the landowners have stolen from the people...
...strong, he is sensitive, but the movie Pedro often has a woman problem. At times a female will be too aggressive for him, like the smoldering, man-eating Katy Jurado in The Seminarian: "Are you retarded? Or are you afraid of me?" she asks as she brazenly removes her shawl. A more troubling blind spot in the Infante character: he keeps falling in love with racial snobs. In The Woman I Lost he becomes a fugitive for having protected Silvia Pinal's honor, only to find that she disdains the half-breed beauty who has saved his life...
...congenial Isabel is panting to take her place? The answer must be: Because it's a parable, stupid. But also because Infante has a natural nobility that explains why? José Carlos (J.C. for short) remains loving through this Calvary of abuse. In so many of his films, a Pedro smile or tear or grimace? make the wildest plot twist plausible (almost). A great spirit must endure great suffering. His silent soldiering-on here is no less heroic than the dreadful beating he takes, and then dishes out, during the Pepe el Toro boxing match. As the ringside announcer says...
...Pedro Infante collection will eventually span 23 features. Now that my appetite is stoked, I'd like to catch up with Dos tipos de cuidado (The Troublesome Two), his only film co-starring Jorge Negrete, and the 1956 Tizoc, his last big movie and the only one he made with Maria Felix. There's also "Los tres huastecos (Three Guys from La Huasteca), in which Pedro plays three roles: a stalwart Army captain, a violin-playing priest and a lumpen atheist. In one film planned at the time of his death, Infante was to play seven different characters...
...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...