Mexican Movies

The World Theater, an obscure cinema house in Manhattan's 49th Street, which usually shows little-known films to discriminating but small audiences, was the center of some surprising mob scenes last week. Good-neighborly crowds jampacked the theater to see some Mexican films.

Chief attractions were 1) a bullfight and 2) a comedian. Better of the two was the bullfight, Silk, Blood and Sun, a gory affair starring one female and two male bullfighters, played by a dark beauty, Gloria Marin, a boyish Mexican matinee idol, Jorge Negrete, and stocky Pepe Ortiz, one of Mexico's top-rank toreadors. The film, which hangs on the usual triangle, gives Actress Marin and Actor Negrete little to do but look pretty, an assignment for which Miss Marin is admirably equipped. But the picture has a rough, lusty wit and becomes intensely exciting when Toreador Ortiz steps into the bull ring.

Second, attraction is Comic Mario Moreno, known throughout Latin America as Cantinflas, Mexico's Charlie Chaplin. He is seen by the U.S. public for the first time* in a two-reeler called The Boxer, which seems much less funny than the worst picture Chaplin ever made. But even in a foreign language and a dub picture, Cantinflas is no ordinary clown. A voluble, ingenuous ragamuffin who always wears the same hardly decent costume (woolen undershirt and baggy pants hitched around his lower hips with a rope), he cuts a brash but appealing figure, shows a subtle taste in slapstick.

By Hollywood standards these Mexican films look crude, but as products of Mexico's infant film industry they show surprising workmanship and an encouraging resistance to Hollywood. Despite low budgets (average picture cost: $25,000), Mexican films are popular throughout Latin America. Twenty-seven producing companies last year turned out 80 pictures. Cantinflas probably has been the biggest single stimulus to this boom.

A onetime tent-show clown, bullfighter, prize fighter, Cantinflas at 31 is vice president of one of Mexico's leading film-producing companies (Posa). His films outdraw Hollywood's in Mexico. Charlie Chaplin, the world's greatest clown, has pronounced Cantinflas the "world's greatest clown."

* Except in Spanish-speaking theaters.

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