Word: peons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...club's ill-fated production "Fiesta." Miss Gloria Braglotti has been secured to "execute the exotic, primitive dance which climaxes the siesta scene in the play," and F. A. Pickard was in the cast for the world premiere. Eugene O'Neil bad called "Fiesta" the best example of Mexican peon life he had ever read; the author was even journeying to Cambridge to see his play staged. But the long arm of decency stopped in after several complaints from spectators that the play was "crude and immoral." Three days after it opened, the mayor of Boston banned the production...
...people who buy and sell in this new Mexico bear about as much resemblance to the old-fashioned U.S. caricature of a barefoot peon on burro-back as Ruiz Cortines does to Pancho Villa. They are a people who have moved out of the adobe huts into the main stream of urban life. They include professional men trained in modern universities. They eat bread instead of tortillas (thereby creating a brand-new demand for wheat that threatens to shake the country's immemorial corn monoculture). They give their children a good education; they live in houses with hot water...
...Fighter (Alex Gottlieb; United Artists) is a fairly flabby film version of Jack London's 1911 story, The Mexican, about a peon who stands up under a brutal beating in an American prize ring so that he can buy guns for the Mexican revolution with the winner-take-all purse...
...picture embellishes the London story with a long, sleepy flashback and some syrupy romantic interest (Vanessa Brown). As a Mexican guerrilla, Lee Cobb gives an intense performance, while Richard Conte is impassioned but too dashing as the peon. In spite of a vigorously photographed ring climax, The Fighter packs little dramatic punch...
...they usually agree that the 1908-35 regime of Juan Vicente Gómez in Venezuela was unsurpassed in greed, cruelty and lust. Ignorant, fierce-mustached Góomez brought to Caracas' Miraflores Palace the bandit morals of the 19th Century caudillos he admired, the manners of the peon he was, the behavior of the bulls he raised. The nation's treasury and the nation's women were his; he liked to share these boons with his bastard brothers and with the 100 or so bastard sons he sired...