THE GOLDEN AGE OF MEXICAN MELODRAMA

     There was a time when cinema would elicit sighs of longing and draw crowds to the movie theaters, speaking Spanish. With films that kept to a formula, as if they were the bulwarks of a moralist vigil that faith and repentance regenerated. Elements included: brides seduced and then abandoned, desolate mothers, prostitutes, gigolos, seducers, and the poverty stricken. Within this cauldron of lust and depravity, all of the elements merged, invariably to be renovated with a wealth of scenario and many other artistic qualities that made history and are today memorable as a golden age.

     This was a time in which cinema always spoke in Spanish and was produced in Mexico to spread throughout Latin America with furor and adoration. Dashing movie stars and their well-rounded divas with seducers in train, won multitudes of admirers. Maria Felix, Dolores del Rio, Andrea Palma, Julian Soler, Ninón Sevilla, Agustin Lara, Domingo Soler, Pedro Armendáriz, Tito Junco, Arturo de Córdova are even today legend. This powerful industry of dreams never deigned to stoop to competition from American films. On the contrary, it was the Americans who were concerned, in associating with their studios and productions, and importing their talent. This cinema occupied space of its own and was, in fact, more visited than the products from Hollywood. Their technicians, mainly photographer Gabriel Figueroa (acknowledged with a book and a retrospective in the 19th Mostra), brought Mexican cinema masterpieces of fine artistic quality, and made them genuine collectors items from an anthology.

     A review of Mexican cinema offers an inexhaustible source of discovery, in terms of aesthetics, sumptuous, magic realism, utopias, moralism, an abundance of baroque, and the most supreme interludes in existence to shorten the distance between heaven and hell, between chastity and perdition, between crime and punishment - a formula that, most certainly, even today, governs the collective unconscious - a proven model of cinema that was at its height between the forties and the fifties, a source from which new disciples and cheap imitators still draw, as do even now, the exponents of contemporary cinema (Leon Cakoff).