The Roots

The Roots (Barbachano Ponce; Edward Harrison). The wind is blowing the world away. Over the cold, dry plain of Mexico, the dust devils march in pallid ranks like ghosts of the land-ravaging conquistadors. Into the storm an Indian leans, and with his mattock chops a hopeless furrow which the wind fills silently behind him."Who digs the land,"the Indians say, "digs his own grave." He pauses, arrested in a Mexican Angelus. Somewhere in this howling world, in a bare mud hut, his child is crying in a basket, and by a tiny fire his wife slaps stolidly at a small tortilla that will be his only supper. The heart of the Indian fills with dread. If he cannot make some money soon, they will all starve. If only he had a cow, he could sell the milk . . .

The next day he tries to sell the saddle cinches his wife has woven; the patron will not buy. He tries to sell his turkey; the patron throws the bird out the door. Desperate, man and wife sit down by the roadside, and he tells her he must go away. Somewhere there must be work to do--or things to steal. In silence she suckles the child. His face softens. The spring of life is flowing still.

Suddenly, a big new car comes rolling down the road. It stops. A spoiled, new-rich couple from the city offers the Indian woman an unheard--of sum if she will leave her own baby and nurse theirs.

Angrily the Indian refuses, but his wife decides to go. She puts the baby in her husband's arms. "Now," she says softly, "you have a cow." The Roots, for seriousness and intensity of feeling, is possibly the strongest motion picture that has been made in Mexico since Luis Bunuel turned out Los Olvidados, and The Cows is clearly the strongest of the film's four episodes. It has the strength of righteous anger, but it has anger's weakness, too. It overstates its case. The Mexican Indian is often poor, but in the villages he is seldom desperate. The land holds him rooted, God shines down upon him like the sun, and the ancient mold of village life supports him as a pot supports a plant. Nevertheless, he lives in a physical misery that is proper subject for the indignation of all feeling men, and with this picture Producer Manuel Barbachano Ponce (Torero!) has added a significant page to the cinematic literature of protest.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.