Those faraway lands south of the border would ever be curious bedfellows of film noir, and no truer testaments to this would come with 1949's Border Incident and subsequently, with more notable examples of the nuances of southern exotic locales, in noir's last hurrah, Orson Welles genre swansong feature Touch of Evil (1958). The first connection to South America could be dated back to an ambitious cinematographer in the name of John Alton who graciously accepted an invitation from an Argentinian magnate to design a studio in San Isidro, just a stone's throw from the country's Capital. A project that would keep Alton put for the next seven years to come. Consequently, not one of the surviving films directed or shot by Alton were considered proto-noirs, though there are some telltale signs of such in Los tres hermetines (The Three Buddies,1932) which displays the optical flair of Alton's signature 'painting with light.' The three-handed interrogation sequence was illuminated by a singular overhead light bulb. When Alton returned to Hollywood's roost following the second World War, domestic variants on urban melodrama became increasingly popular in Argentina, Brazil and Central America.
The family melodrama vied for attention with the Mexican brothel or cabanuta film in which the archetypal fallen woman ultimately turns to a life of ill repute or often as a dime-a-dance gal - and music and dance (often provided by the comely Cuban-Mexican chanteuse Ninon Sevilla) are mixed into a heady concoction with both noir and the psychological drama. The most acclaimed of these films was Alberto Gout's, the director whom Miss Sevilla was often associated with; The Adventuress (1949).
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| Emilio Fernandez' beloved Soy puro Mexicano (1942) |
Mexico's take on neo-realist film making often emphasized their grottier side of urban living and this was represented in the films of the influential Ismael Rodriguez and Alejandro Galindo, one of the most celebrated directors of Mexico's golden age - who made celluloid hay out of urban impoverishment with the latter directing two films about the travails of a city bus driver, Esquina bajan...! (Stop at the Corner,1948)! and Hay lugar para...dos (There's Room For Two,1949)
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| Bunuel's brutal Los olividados |
And followng Galindo's gallants efforts, the surrealist Spaniard, Luis Bunuel, in his self-imposed exiled days in Mexico would paint a shockingly bleak and violent picture of Mexico City's youth-in Los olividados (The Young And The Damned,1950) and two years later, filmed the gripping tale of an 'enforcer' who sees the very error of his ways in the noir-inflected El Bruto. Other Mexican directors turned out urban gangster dramas, the best of which (El Suavecito,1950) directed by Fernando Mendez, according to critic Eduardo de la Vega Alfaro, stands comparison with Robert Wise's The Set Up (1949) and Victimas del Pecado (Victims of Sin,1951)
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| Can you hear the drums Fernandez? |
From 1955 onward, however, the industry sharply declined. Thereafter, Mexico would struggle to make much of an impact on film noir. Emilio 'El Indio' Fernandez, who was the Mexican equivalent of director John Ford, later would establish himself as a character actor in mainstream Hollywood, in such roles as the belligerent General Mapache in Sam Pekinpah's ultraviolent psycho-western The Wild Bunch (1969), but he would never quite recapture the triumphs of his directorial heyday.