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Critics’ Notebook
A Lincoln Center retrospective highlights mid-century films aimed at audiences that continue to influence filmmakers.
By Carlos Aguilar
Charlatans, clumsy womanizers, enigmatic girls and even a monster-fighting paladin captured the minds of Mexican audiences in the golden age of the country’s film industry in the mid-twentieth century.
An era of prolific productions across all genres and stars benefiting from exclusive studio contracts, it rivaled the Hollywood formula in the quality and variety of its output. Today, most local Mexican productions struggle to find their place on screens amid the omnipresent presence of American blockbusters that attract local moviegoers.
But from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, Mexican cinema flourished in part thanks to U. S. involvement in World War II. With U. S. resources allocated to the war effort, Mexican corporations saw an opportunity to produce films for and about their own country that could also be released in other Spanish-speaking territories.
With titles in much of this period, the retrospective “Every Day Show: Mexican Popular Cinema” premieres Friday at Film at Lincoln Center. These films, entertaining the general public, focus their attraction on unlikely heroes and heroines who, despite their personality whims or individual circumstances, demonstrated a strong ethical compass and unwavering pride. In the end they do (for the most part) what is right, even if human weaknesses more than once get in the way of their maximum productive intentions.
For several decades after their first theatrical release, most of those films have endured in the Mexican collective consciousness and continue to influence popular culture through their uninterrupted availability on television. As a child, in Mexico City in the 1990s, I captured fragments of them a stopover at my grandmothers’ house, for whom the men and women who then appeared on the small screen had been larger-than-life in their youth.
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