03 · 13 · 25

ESTRATEGIA MATRIMONIO: the sixties and seventies

Rafael Aviña

The idealization of marriage in the Mexican cinema of the forties and fifties was one of the most frequent topics, using a paternalistic vision as shown in the following films: Una familia de tantas, Anillo de compromiso, Hijas casaderas, Chicas casaderas and more. However, in the following two decades, that topic became more bitter and questionable, as shown in A Married Woman (1979), by Alberto Bojórquez. In this film, the main character (Alma Muriel) wants to become independent from her husband and decides to divorce him after the beating he (Gonzalo Vega) gives her, to conclude with a tragic and fateful ending. Shortly before, Bojórquez himself portrayed a heroine who was aware that marriage would ruin her plans of professional advancement in Lo mejor de Teresa (1976), with Tina Romero.

However, at the beginning of the sixties, the theme of the search for marriage was diluted in the formulas of comedy and the war between the sexes: in Despedida de casada (dir. Juan de Orduña, 1966), Héctor Suárez, a sponsor and a very hard-driving TV producer, is determined to take the divorced Julissa to bed in Acapulco. And in Los años verdes (dir. Jaime Salvador, 1966), the young girls of a modern boarding school —Claudia Islas, Leonorilda Ochoa and Rosa María Vázquez— wear baby dolls and dance to go-go music; but their real goal is to have a good wedding with nice guys like Enrique Álvarez Félix or Héctor Suárez, students in a small-town guesthouse; naive, docile, apolitical young men in little ties and cashmere sweaters.

In Estrategia matrimonio (dir. Alberto Gout, 1966), Silvia Pinal puts into practice a clever plan to marry a millionaire and in El matrimonio es como el demonio (dir. René Cardona Jr., 1967), with Elsa Aguirre, Mauricio Garcés, a single and mature playboy doesn't know what good he has, until he finds himself married and, little by little, discovers that committing to a woman is not an easy task and being faithful to her is almost impossible, followed by El día de la boda (Cardona Jr., 1967), about the love affairs of two couples: the modern parents of a pair of conflictive teenagers, or Ensayo de una noche de bodas (dir. José María Fernández Unsaín, 1967) in which Julissa is a young woman who pretends to be a prostitute but what she really wants is to get married, repeating the model of the ideal wedding.

More intriguing are Cómo pescar marido (dir. Alfredo B. Crevenna, 1966) and El primer paso... de la mujer (dir. José Estrada, 1971). In the first one, Fanny Cano and Hilda Aguirre, modern and successful women, try to get a “good match” while Maricruz Olivier has divorced Joaquín Cordero. Cano encourages him with the help of her boyfriend Jorge Rivero, an airline pilot, to get Cordero and Olivier back together. Hilda is pursued by the young and shy doctor Horacio Salinas and her mature boss Raúl Astor. The first and last scenes are hilarious with Rivero and Cano as Adam and Eve in Paradise and, at the end, Luz María Aguilar comments at the triple wedding: "The real battle: to keep the husband. Love begins now and you have to be such a woman to win it"; a phrase that undoubtedly defines the ideology imposed on the female characters of the turbulent sixties.

Finally, El primer paso... de la mujer, based on the play by Alfonso Paso: La corbata adapted by Perro Estrada and Toni Sbert, tells a trio of stories intertwined by three young women from different social strata who took the wrong step before getting married. They are: Ana Martín as Rosa, the young proletarian girl whose father is Remigio, a corrupt leader of “paratroopers” (Arturo “Bigotón” Castro) in an impoverished area and her boyfriend, a young welder played by Ricardo Blume. Verónica Castro is Esperanza, a middle-class young woman studying at UNAM whose father, Arturo (Guillermo Orea), is a humble employee of millionaire Carlos (Óscar Ortiz de Pinedo) who dreams of winning the Mexico ‘70 World Cup soccer pool. Esperanza’s boyfriend is Mike (Ricardo Cortez), a veterinary student and American football player. And finally: Alicia Encinas is Coquis, the “good girl” and spoiled daughter of the millionaire businessman who sends Arturo to bribe Remigio to get hold of the land his followers occupy and where he will build condominiums. 

Coquis loses her virginity at the Hotel Hacienda Cocoyoc to the shy and naive ex-seminarian Nicolás (Pedro Regueiro). Arturo wins the betting pool, but the ticket was never delivered by his daughter. As he does not know it himself, he offends his boss feeling emboldened and then has to humiliate himself and his wife in order to get his job back. Meanwhile, Remigio is lynched by his colleagues, but before that, both Esperanza and Rosa have married, as wall as Carlos’ daughter with the ex-seminarian of aristocratic parents who have fallen into disrepair, in an apparently light film, which ironized the moral conception of the wedding to hide the misfortune of the woman and the frustrated aspirations of three young girls of different social status before the imminent wedding; a topic of concern of those years. 

Translated by Adrik Díaz