01 · 05 · 22

Luck and chance in Mexican cinema

Rafael Aviña

Fortune, stroke of luck, fate, destiny, happiness, chance. “Suerte te dé Dios que el saber nada te importe...” [“God grant you luck that knowing nothing matters to you...”]“], ”Llévese el huerfanito jefe: hoy lo compra, mañana lo cobra...“ [”Boss, take the little orphan away: today you buy it, tomorrow you cash it...“]”. Under the protection of sayings and phrases like these, national cinema has used the theme of luck as the raw material for dozens of comic or melodramatic plots that go from the ranch to the capital and vice versa, showing palenques¹, small-town fairs, bar tables or gambling halls as a symbol of that implacable destiny that brings happiness or tragedy.

This is shown by: Pedro Infante and Antonio Badú, two cheating and very macho gamblers in El gavilán pollero. As well as Los tres alegres compadres (1951), with Andrés Soler, a mature and relaxed man who teaches his two sons (Jorge Negrete and Pedro Armendáriz) the art of playing cards and scams. Andrés and Germán Valdés themselves share a delightful moment in a poker game where the indigenous Chamula, played by Tin Tan, and his fairy godfather play two naïve men in a clandestine gambling room in El Ceniciento (1951).

In turn, the action can take place in the ornate arches of the town's squares through which fast horses cross, whose riders gamble with wealth, power or the beauty of a lady. Fernando Casanova played the role of El hombre del alazán (1958), a daring horseman who passes through the fairs as a vagabond to cheat the horse bettors. Likewise, in this rural universe, the stigma of cards is not lost. Un As de oros (1967) decides the fortune of Manuel Capetillo, in a portrait of small-town folklore, with its songs, cockfights and card and dice games as the premise of a tragicomedy far removed from other similar stories that the genre exploited twenty years earlier, such as Cartas marcadas (1947) with Pedro Infante and Marga López.

Luck and amulets are part of those stories that intelligently approach tragedy, as in a couple of works directed by Roberto Gavaldón. On the one hand, El siete de copas (1960) and a story of palenques, passion and misfortune in El gallo de oro (1964), written by Gabriel García Márquez, Gavaldón and Carlos Fuentes from a text by Juan Rulfo, which was adapted two decades later in a harsh manner by Arturo Ripstein and Paz Alicia Garciadiego under the name El imperio de la fortuna (1986), with Ernesto Gómez Cruz and Blanca Guerra.

Ustedes los ricos (1948, dir. Ismael Rodríguez)

The whole series, the "cachito" or the "huérfanito", becomes the axis of a plot with the trite affair of the winning ticket that passes from hand to hand in El billetero (1951), starring David Silva and Raphael J. Sevilla Jr.; a young boy who loses and recovers a winning ticket in the midst of a melodramatic plot that includes amnesia and fires. Once again Tin Tan, master of the city and of popular slang, teaches Perla Aguiar how to sell a lottery ticket in Gilberto Martínez Solares' El revoltoso (1951). Tin Tan himself, as a tent merchant and in love with Tongolele, is involved in an impulsive plot to get his hands on a lottery ticket worth five million pesos in Ismael Rodríguez's ¡Mátenme porque me muero!

In Por qué pecan las mujeres (1951), female star Leticia Palma is a lottery ticket seller who ends up as a declining singer in this melodrama with several good musical numbers and songs by Agustín Lara, Pérez Prado and Juan Bruno Tarraza, among others. Several decades later, tales of luck and redemption would be seen in El billetero/Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl (1983) with Rafael Inclán, who accidentally gets hold of an entire winning series of ten million pesos, however, everything goes wrong. Fernando Pérez Gavilán's La lotería (1993) is composed of four humorous stories starring billfolders and customers who place their hopes in one or more lottery tickets, in search of that slim luck for which Mexicans suffer so much.

Translated by Adrik Díaz