07 · 20 · 23

The beginnings of action and adventure cinema. The unusual case of Gabriel García Moreno

Rafael Aviña

Gabriel García Moreno's work, with its diverse themes ranging from action, adventure, detective stories and even the world of drugs and narcotics with curious, surprising and amusing results, reaches notable degrees of delirium that place it on the borderline of the fantastic. A filmmaker born in Tacubaya in 1897, García Moreno was ahead of his time with the production of the unusual eight-reel series El puño de hierro (1927), starring the effective actor and later screenwriter Carlos Villatoro and centered on a bad dream caused by morphine.

García Moreno undertook a carefree portrayal of a drug environment in a suspenseful film, outstanding not only for its vertiginous technique, but above all for the drug theme handled with surprising realism, as shown in the nightclub full of drug addicts, worthy of the opium smokehouse that opened and closed Sergio Leone's masterful film, Once Upon a Time in America (1984).

A young man who injects himself with morphine, a medical eminence who gives a lecture on the evils of drug addiction who in reality is an accomplished drug addict nicknamed “El Tieso”, and who tries to abuse a girl in a nightmarish nightclub of perdition. In reality, a morphinomaniac nightmare that manages to create awareness in the protagonist. El puño de hierro is an unusual film that tried to understand and attack the dangers of drugs at the time, a worthy antecedent to another memorable and very funny work: Marihuana, directed in 1936 by the Chilean living in Mexico, José Che Bohr, about the vicissitudes of a group of marijuana traffickers and their victims, with a cast that included Lupita Tovar, Emilio Indio Fernández and Sara García.

A year earlier, García Moreno directed the silent film classic, The Ghost Train (1926), an exciting railroad adventure film with action scenes worthy of Harold Lloyd's films, shot in Orizaba, Veracruz, starring Carlos Villatoro himself, Clarita Ibáñez and Manolo de los Ríos as the cynical villain who regenerates at the end. For its realization, the director obtained a concession from Ferrocarriles Nacionales to film inside the recently inaugurated electric train that transported the Ferrocarril El Mexicano, from Puebla, through the Cumbres de Maltrata, to Orizaba. It also included documentary scenes of the Orizaba bullring and a brief performance by bullfighter Juan Silvetti. However, on a technical and film genre level, it is surprising to see the action sequences and the enormous mastery of cinematographic language, very much in debt with Hollywood cinema of the time.

Indeed, if anything stands out in this film, it is these scenes, halfway between westerns and old film series such as those of The Perils of Pauline or The Lone Ranger. In this sense, there are many incredible sequences that take place on the roof of the “Mexicano”, chases on roofs, last minute rescues on horseback, as well as the scenes of the train about to derail or be blown up with dynamite. In a remote era in which filmmakers such as Miguel Contreras Torres and Guillermo Calles were entrenched in a primitive, enthusiastic and nationalist cinema, Gabriel García Moreno made his way as an unusual director with a work that began with El buitre (1925), Misterio (1926), the documentary Carnaval de la ciudad de México (1926), The Ghost Train (1926) and El puño de hierro (1926).

At the end of the 1920s, the filmmaker traveled to Hollywood and, without any recommendation, got a job at Hal Roach Studios —famous for producing Harold Lloyd's Little Rascals/ Our Gang and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy's films— in the Backgrounds and Miniatures Department. There he perfected his skills as a laboratorian and invented a rapid developing process. Accompanied by several American technicians, he returned to Mexico in 1937 and founded Estudios García Moreno, which would later become Estudios Azteca. Conflicts with some partners caused him to separate from the company and he then created the Laboratorios Cinematográficos Moreno in Mixcoac, where he tested color film. However, he died in 1943, leaving several projects unfinished.

Translated by Adrik Díaz