02 · 13 · 25

PEPE EL TORO appears in Cahiers

Rafael Aviña

Without a doubt, one of the most moving and enjoyable moments of the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM) is the one dedicated to the retrospectives of classic Mexican cinema. Having the fortune of presenting many of their titles is a privilege and an indescribable pleasure, as it is to witness the crowded Theater 5 of Cinépolis Morelia Centro, where these screenings take place. What is surprising is that this space is not only filled with mature spectators, but also with hundreds of young people who have turned into new cinephiles, learning from the films that their parents or grandparents saw on the big screen. And not only them, but also Mexican and foreign specialists fascinated by the vision of Mexican filmmakers that portrayed multiple realities of Mexico.

However, among these large groups of spectators, one French critic, researcher and cinephile, who faithfully attends the retrospectives in Theater 5, stands out in particular; his name is: Charles Tesson, a regular contributor to the famous magazine Cahiers du Cinéma since 1979, where he worked as editor between 1998 and 2003. In addition to being a professor of film history and aesthetics at the Sorbonne, and author of several books and essays such as: Luis Buñuel (1995), El, Luis Buñuel: Étude critique (1996), Théâtre et cinéma (2007) and Akira Kurosawa (2008), and member of the selection committee of the Cannes Critics’ Week, Tesson has just published this week, in Cahiers du Cinéma, a splendid essay that pays tribute to the work carried out by Daniela Michel and her team at FICM, and to actor and singer Pedro Infante and his main filmmaker Ismael Rodríguez, whose work was revisited last year in Morelia. The essay, entitled “Le phénomène Pedro Infante” manifests his clear fascination for Mexican cinema.

Tesson writes: “DISCOVERY” —in capital letters— “After the tribute to Fernando de Fuentes (see Cahiers n° 804), the Morelia Festival in Mexico dedicated its retrospective to director Ismael Rodríguez (who directed sixty-three films from 1943 to 1999), and indirectly to actor and singer Pedro Infante (1917-1957), as the fates of these two men are so closely intertwined. Ismael Rodríguez's work best characterizes the Mexican cinema of the Golden Age (1936-1956), through a genre, the so-called ‘suburban’ cinema, that portrays the life of a proletarian district in Mexico City by mixing a multitude of characters. Comedy is mixed with drama of social dimension (inequalities, injustices), by using the resources of melodrama (gray zones and revelations), shown over a background of musical tradition (there is singing). Nosotros los pobres (1947) is the prototype of the genre. Why did this film give birth to the cult of Pedro Infante, when the actor-singer had already appeared in sixteen films since 1942, six of them under his direction?”.

I remember very well Tesson’s enchanted face at the end of the screening of Campeón sin corona (1945) —cited in his text, by the way— at the tribute dedicated to its director Alejandro Galindo at the 20th edition of FICM, surprised by the amount of social and narrative elements in each scene, the brief talk we had about it and his surprise when, last year, he discovered Ismael Rodríguez’s films. It was such a great impact that the Cahiers du Cinéma critic writes an elaborate analysis on Pedro and Ismael's filmic relationship, particularly centered on the trilogy of the films: Nosotros los pobres (1947), Ustedes los ricos (1948) and Pepe El Toro (1952), and goes beyond by analyzing the figure of Infante whom he places “right in the middle” of the extremes of the other great male figures of Mexican cinematography: “the confirmed and glorified machismo of Pedro Armendáriz in Emilio Fernández and, on the other hand, the neurotic or even toxic bourgeois Arturo de Córdova”.

Indeed, Infante seemed destined to become an actor-singer and/or another handsome and charming leading man on Mexican screens in the early forties, and it was not until his reunion with Rodríguez that his myth was reinforced. It was Ismael who made him a star and turned him into an idol by taking advantage of that image of a fragile man who cries to his grandmother at her grave in ¡Vuelven los García! (1946) or endures the humiliations of a cruel father (an outstanding Fernando Soler) in La oveja negra and No desearás la mujer de tu hijo (1949), or at the same time explodes in laughter and a compulsive crying in the presence of his little son burned by the fire caused by the murderer Ledo (Jorge Arriaga) and his henchmen in Ustedes los ricos. Without a doubt, Ismael Rodríguez's effectiveness and sensitivity was confirmed when he elevated Pedro Infante as a city hero in Nosotros los pobres, an emotional and brutal story about the dignity of poverty and the epic of the barrio [a proletarian district] and its stories of the outskirts, supported by his screenwriter Pedro de Urdimalas and later by Rogelio A. González.  

In the 1940s, with the trilogy of Pepe El Toro, Infante and Blanca Estela Pavón, who passed away prematurely in a fatal accident, would become the most sensitive couple in Mexican cinema. By the 1950s, Infante was the center of the recording and film industry with fundamental works such as A.T.M.: ¡¡A toda máquina!!, Dos tipos de cuidado or Tizoc, all by Ismael Rodríguez. However, he was overworked, shooting four or five films per year. In 1953 alone he appeared in nine films. He had a long line of relatives and women, in combination with his obsession for cars and for flying his airplane, until he suffered a tragic accident in which he perished on April 15, 1957.

Not only the Mexican people and film industry were shaken by the news, but also the very core of the earth. In July of 1957, three months after Infante’s death, an earthquake knocked down the Angel of Independence on Paseo de la Reforma, which we interpret as an allegory of the great lost idol, while Estudios Clasa and Tepeyac [important studios from the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema] closed.

Born in 1917, like Ismael himself, and almost seven decades after his death, Infante's myth prevails with the same strength as Tesson’s text shows, despite the fact that the popular actor and singer was overexploited inside an industry as visionary as it was voracious. 

Translated by Adrik Díaz