|
|
Emilio Fernández,
Ten of a Kind
by
Maggie Van Ostrand
"It
was Emilio Fernández who posed nude for the statuette so zealously
sought: the Oscar."
|
|
Just
when you think you know everything about the golden age of movies,
along comes still more information to snap you back to reality. You
may not have ever heard of him yourself, but one of the most famous
people in the history of Mexican cinema, was Emilio Fernández Romo,
fondly nicknamed "El Indio."
It's not only that Fernández was famous in the movie industry (more
about that later), but his entire life was so fascinating that you'd
be sure to invite him to dine, just to listen to his stories.
Fernández was born in 1904 in Coahuila, Mexico, and grew up to be
a strong supporter of Mexican cultural nationalism. He also grew up
to be quite tall for those days, nearly six feet.
He was alleged to have had "violent machismo," rooted in the Revolution
of 1910-17. This violent streak would surface many years later.
Born of a Spanish father and an Indian mother, the boy was a mestizo
(mestizaje).
As a teenager, Fernández quit school to serve as an officer in the
Huertista rebellion, which broke out December 4, 1923. Pancho Villa
had been ambushed and killed the previous July, and it was theorized
that he was assassinated by agents of then Mexican President Alvaro
Obregón Salido. Obregón had defeated Villa in four successive battles,
collectively known as the Battle of Celaya, when he served as a general
during the Revolution. This Battle remained the largest military confrontation
in Latin American history, until the Falklands War in 1982.
According to Fernández' biographers, and here we have a bit of a history
lesson which ultimately involves our subject, under the Constitution
of 1917 that Obregón himself helped write, Mexican presidents could
not succeed themselves. (Obregón would later have the constitution
amended so he could serve a second, non-consecutive term; after winning
the presidential election of 1928, he was assassinated before his
inauguration.)
Obregón had won the presidency in 1920 after inciting a successful
military revolt against President Venustiano Carranza, who had planned
on naming Ignacio Bonillas as his successor rather than Obregón. The
revolt began when the governor of the Mexican state of Sonora, General
Adolfo de la Huerta, broke with President Carranza and declared the
secession of Sonora. This was a signal for the beginning of the successful
uprising against Carranza led by Obregón and supported by General
Plutarco Elías Calles. After Carranza was killed in an ambush, General
Huerta served as provisional president of Mexico from June 1 to December
1, 1920, until elections could be held. When Obregón won the federal
election, Huerta became Minister of Finance in the new government.
General de la Huerta considered himself the natural successor to President
Obregón, just as Obregón had considered himself Carranza's natural
successor. The murdered Villa was seen as an ally of de la Huerta,
who had publicly announced his candidacy for the presidency. Obregón,
however, planned to remain in power by handpicking his successor,
a tradition that lasted throughout 20th century Mexican politics.
When President Obregón named his anti-clerical Minister of the Interior
Plutarco Elías Calles as his heir, General de la Huerta rose up in
a rebellion that eventually affected half the Mexican army. A native
like de la Huerta of Sonora and a general in the Mexican army, Calles
had preceded him as governor and military ruler of their home state
in 1915-16.
De la Huerta assumed his service and loyalty to Obregón would have
brought him the presidency, but Mexican presidents, not allowed to
succeed themselves and limited (mostly) to one term, tried to extend
their power by naming political puppets as successors. (Calles would
outdo Obregón by controlling the Mexican presidency outright or through
puppets from 1924 to 1934.)
The rebellion was very serious, but President Obregón was able to
quash it by using loyal army units, battalions of workers and farmers,
and United States intervention. By the time the rebellion ended in
March 1924, 54 generals and 7,000 soldiers had been terminated from
the country's armed forces via death on the battlefield, execution,
exile, or dismissal. Obregón banished de la Huerta to exile in the
United States, where he lived in Los Angeles, supporting himself as
a music teacher.
Such
was the cauldron of violence and nationalism in which the young Fernández
came into his manhood. He received a 20-year prison sentence for his
participation in the rebellion -- and because he was on the wrong
side.
Escaping prison by following de la Heurta into exile in Los Angeles,
Fernández learned the rudiments of filmmaking as a bit player and
extra working in Hollywood in the 1920s and early `30s. With the election
of Lázaro Cárdenas as president in 1934, the Heurista rebels were
granted an amnesty. General de la Heurta was recalled from exile by
Cárdenas in 1935 and served in several posts, including Inspector
General of Foreign Consulates and Director General of Civil Pensions.
Fernández returned to Mexico in 1934 and began working in the Mexican
movie industry as a screenwriter and actor. His Indian looks, which
gave him his nickname "El Indio," also brought him his first lead
role, playing an Indian in Janitzio (1935). Due to his physicality
and Indian face, El Indio was cast as bandits, charros (cowboys),
and revolutionaries.
The Cárdenas government of 1934 to 1940 established the framework
in which the Mexican Golden Age of Cinema could be realized. The political
system that dominated Mexico for over half a century was consolidated
during his regime. The government incorporated trade unions, campesino
(peasant) organizations, and middle-class professionals and office
workers into the ruling Party of the Mexican Revolution (later the
Party of the Institutional Revolution). Cárdenas oversaw the redistribution
of millions of acres of land to peasants and the expansion of collective
bargaining rights and wage increases to workers.
Cárdenas and all subsequent PRM/PRI presidents (all presidents of
Mexico in the 20th Century beginning with Calles were PRM/PRI members;
Vincente Fox was the first from outside the party in over three-quarters
of a century).
More historical events leading up to Fernández' coming importance
to Mexico must be written here as the foundation in which he prospered
and in which his creative juices began to flourish.
Arguably, Cárdenas' most notable achievement was the nationalization
of Mexico's oil industry. After unsuccessfully trying to negotiate
better terms with Mexican Eagle, the holding company owned by Royal
Dutch/Shell and Standard Oil of New Jersey, Cárdenas nationalized
Mexico's petroleum reserves and expropriated the equipment of the
foreign oil companies in 1938. A spontaneous six-hour parade broke
out in Mexico City to celebrate the event.
Unlike Castro's nationalization of foreign assets in Cuba, Shell and
SONJ were compensated for their expropriated assets. Petróleos Mexicanos
(Pemex) and the Mexican model became a beacon for other oil-producing
nations seeking to gain control over their own energy resources from
foreign companies.
Lázaro Cárdenas was the only PRM/PRI president who did not make himself
rich. After retiring as Minister of Defense in 1945, the post he took
after relinquishing the presidency, he assumed a modest lifestyle.
He spent the last years of his life supervising irrigation projects
and promoting education and free medical care for the poor. This was
the man who set the tone of the modern Mexico that arose from the
Revolution and Civil Wars of the 1920s, who cleared the ground for
the great economic boom of the 1940s in which the Golden Age of Mexican
Cinema reached its zenith.
The
classic Mexican cinema had mostly been ignored in the United States
due to the language barrier and a colonialist mindset. When the Mexican
cinema was noticed by those north of the border, the focus fell on
the brilliant cinematography of Gabriel Figueroa, who shot films for
John Ford and John Huston, or on former Hollywood star Dolores
del Rio, about whom you have read in an earlier edition of this
publication.
One of the most interesting and little-known incidents in the life
of this fascinating man, Fernández, was his platonic relationship
with Dolores del Rio. Her famous
husband, the multi-Oscar-winning designer, Cedric Gibbons, had been
assigned by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, the task
of designing a statuette to be awarded annually for excellence in
film. Dolores del Rio introduced Fernández to her husband and suggested
that he would make a good model for the statuette.
Gibbons agreed that Fernández would indeed be perfect. It was Emilio
Fernández who posed nude for the statuette so zealously sought: the
Oscar.
We told you he was fascinating.
While
Mexico has often served as a locale for American films - tales of
sweet young things imperiled by Mexican bandits and of Americans in
revolutionary Mexico, to say nothing of Zorro and The Cisco Kid -
have been part of the Yankee cinema since the East Coast-based film
companies began relocating to southern California in the early 1910s.
Gringo Warner Baxter won the second Oscar ever awarded for Best Actor
for his portrayal of The Cisco Kid. We wonder if he knew who the model
was for his award.
Mexico has been the site of such blockbuster films as Viva Villa!
(1934), Juarez (1939), Viva Zapata! (1952), Vera Cruz (1954), The
Professionals (1966), and The Wild Bunch, but except for Caza del
Oro, La, (1972), they seldom featured Mexican actors in anything other
than bit parts. with the exception of half-Mexican, half-Irish Anthony
Quinn, one of the few to achieve superstar status.
Salma Hayek, who later also achieved the elusive status of superstar,
is of mixed Mexican and Arab parentage, is arguably the first Mexican
since Lupe Valez and Dolores del Rio
to cross over and still remain identifiably Mexican. |
Until
the 1990s, Mexican movies themselves seldom strayed into Yankee consciousness,
except for the rare one like La Perla (The Pearl) (1947), based on
a novella (only 96 pages) by John Steinbeck. The Pearl was directed
by our friend, Emilio Fernandez.
The film came into being when Steinbeck met Fernández while on vacation
in 1941. The two hit it off, and Steinbeck entertained Fernández by
telling him a Mexican folk story he had heard from the locals, the
story of a pearl.
Fernández was
equally impressed and told Steinbeck he should write the story as
a book, and to also think about it as a film. Steinbeck wrote The
Pearl as a novella, with the movie in mind. Fernández worked with
Steinbeck to turn the story into the final movie. |
|
When the two, with the assistance of Jack Wagner, were finished, they
assembled an incredible cast. The hero, Quino, was played by Pedro
Armendariz. One of the biggest stars in Mexico, Armendariz was brilliant
in such Mexican films as Maria Candelaria with timeless beauty and
Fernández friend, Dolores del Rio,
and el Bruto for director Luis Bunuel. Green-eyed and oozing virility,
Armedariz was also a hit with American director John Ford, starring
in such films as Three Godfathers and Fort Apache.
The film won the Mexican Academy Award for Best Picture, Figueroa
won the Golden Globe Award for best cinematography, and Fernández
was nominated for a Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival.
The
Golden Age of Mexican cinema stretches back to 1936, and peaked in
the mid-1940s when two of Fernandez's films won the Grand Prix at
the Cannes Film Festival and were nominated for the Golden Lion at
the Venice Film Festival, thereby receiving international recognition
at long last.
This international importance terminated in the mid-`50s, with the
end of Fernandez's 25-film collaboration with cinematographer Figueroa.
Mexican movies typically were genre pictures, melodramas, romances,
musicals, comedies, and horror, which addressed all aspects of Mexican
society, from love stories about the proletariat to dramas about the
Indians. Mexican movies are a mirror of Mexican society, including
history (19th century dictator Porfirio Díaz and his court, The Revolution
and Villa and Zapata), obsessions (both familial and erotic), and
mythology (Indian and urban culture). With its proximity to Hollywood,
and the fact that many stars of the Mexican cinema were familiar with
Hollywood production values, the indigenous movie industry set a high
standard for itself to measure up to Hollywood product.
But Fernández was not only a revolutionary, a model, and a director,
he was also an actor. He made his motion picture debut as an actor
in Chano Urueta's Destino, El (1928), but his early work in movies
was in American westerns churned out by Monogram director Joseph P.
McCarthy, including the Bob Steele programmers Oklahoma Cyclone (1930),
The Land of Missing Men (1930), Headin' North (1930) Sunrise Trail
(1931), and the Tim McCoy horse opera The Western Code (1932). After
playing a supporting player in Enrico Caruso, Jr.'s Buenaventura,
La (1934), he made his return to Mexican pictures in 1934, starring
in Corazón Bandolero (1934) and director Fernando de Fuentes Cruz
Diablo (1934).
Fernández's
first film as a director was La Isla de la Pasion (1942), in 1941,
which he also wrote and played a bit part in. The movie starred Pedro
Armendáriz, who El Indio would cast in many of his films. Another
favorite collaborator was his wife, Columba Dominguez.
El Indio rapidly gained a reputation as Mexico's premier director
making populist dramas. His film María Candelaria (1944) put
Mexican film on the map when it won Grand Prize at the Cannes Film
Festival in 1946. The film has been variously praised as "the highest
triumph of Mexican plastic arts on celluloid" and as "a titanic promise
for strictly patriotic [Mexican] cinema." French film critic Georges
Sadoul, in his 1954 book "Histoire Général du Cinema," praised the
film for its "authentic" portrayal of rural Mexican life and for addressing
race relations.
The film remains controversial in Mexico over El Indio's aesthetic
choices, which emphasized the exotic and primitive, and his representation
of Mexican Indians, which some critics believed was inauthentic or
"touristy."
The nationalistic Fernández wanted to articulate an idea of what it
meant to be Mexican that was uniquely Mexican, and not influenced
by Hollywood, whose films he felt were Americanizing Mexican cinema
audiences. Terming his films "autos sacramentales (passion plays)
of mexicanidad," Fernández wanted to create a Mexican cinema that
Mexicanized Mexicans.
Maria Candelaria stars Dolores del Rio,
who had returned to Mexico after becoming disillusioned with the American
movie industry, as the daughter of a prostitute trying to survive
just before the Revolution. Set in the floating gardens of Xochimilco
in Mexico City, del Rio's character is shunned by the indigenous locals.
Her great desire is to marry her lover, played by Pedro Armendáriz,
but their romance proves to be star-crossed.
The climax of "María Candelaria" was a homage to Carlos Navarro's
classic "indigenista" movie Janitzio (1935).
Fernández's direction was flawless, and Figeuroa's black-and-white
cinematography was masterful. The collaborators created one of the
classics of not just Mexican movies but of world cinema. When El Indio
and Figueroa were making María Candelaria, they were part of a movement
in which Mexican filmmakers were consciously attempting to create
an indigenous art cinema that could compete with Hollywood product
while simultaneously articulating a vision of Mexicans that was rooted
in the "indigenismo" and "mestizophilia" of Mexican intellectuals.
Gabriel Figueroa was conscious of the fact that he and Fernández,
a creative team that became known as "Epoca de Oro," invented an idea
of rural Mexico that did not actually exist. Figueroa established
himself as the leader in imagining a new, post-revolutionary Mexican
consciousness though the vehicle of the visual image.
Known as a "painter in light," Figueroa learned his craft from Gregg
Toland and Edward Tisse, Eisenstein's cinematographer. Figueroa is
credited with creating the classic Mexican film aesthetic in collaboration
with El Indio and other film directors. In over 200 movies, he developed
the classic imagery and aesthetic of Mexican cinema, which also influenced
and was influenced by contemporary Mexican artists. Figueroa pioneered
an indigenous visual vernacular that affected the muralist movement,
and he has been referred to as the fourth of the most important Mexican
muralist after Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Siqueiros. Siqueiros
himself called Figueroa's cinematography "murals that travel."
In
their 25 films together between 1942 and 1958, El Indio and Figueroa
created the idea of "mexicanidad" cinema while elevating the mestizaje
identity, as well as the status of the pre-Columbian culture. The
epic visual style they developed was indebted to Eisenstein's unfinished
"Que viva Mexico." Their style fetishized the Mexican landscape through
beautiful, carefully composed, stationary long shots. For two decades,
Mexican art cinema was identified with the films resulting from the
Fernández-Figueroa collaboration. Their films not only affected Mexican
audiences' collective identity, but they affected how their audiences,
both domestic and global, viewed Mexico and its history.
In 1946, Fernández filmed an adaptation of John Steinbeck's novella
"The Pearl," in Spanish- and English-language versions. Shot by Figueroa
and starring El Indio's favorite actor, Pedro Armendariz, Perla, La
(1947) won El Indio a nomination for Golden Lion at the Venice Film
Festival, further solidifying Fernandez's notoriety as a director
and publicizing the Mexican movie industry. The film also won him
the Golden Ariel (the Mexican equivalent of the Oscars) for Best Picture
of 1948, and Fernández, Figueroa, Armendáriz and Juan García won Silver
Ariels for Best Direction, Cinematography, Actor and Supporting Actor,
respectively. Figueroa won a Golden Globe for Best Cinematography
in 1949 from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
In 1948, his film Salón México (1949) was released, written and directed
by Fernández, with cinematography by Figueroa. An urban melodrama,
the film was ground-breaking in that it helped usher in a new genre,
the "cabaretera" (cabaret) film, racier and just as commercial as
the familiar genre of rancheras, which was then fading in popularity.
The movie recreates the atmosphere of the famous Mexico City dance
hall and won Marga López an Ariel Award, for her role as the taxi
dancer Mercedes. The movie featured a sensual soundtrack performed
by the Afro-Cuban music group El Son Clave de Oro By the end of the
1940s, Emilio Fernández was the most famous and prestigious director
in all of Latin America. He would continue his reign as Mexico's premier
director into the mid-`50s, when his powers began to decline and Spanish
émigré Luis Buñuel took over the title. As the most famous directors
and biggest stars aged or died, Mexican cinema began to decline commercially,
and the Golden Age of Mexican cinema came to an end.
Although the Fernández and Figueroa last worked together in Cita de
amour, Una (1958)_, which starred El Indio's half-brother Jaime Fernández,
the collaboration was essentially over in the mid-`50s, when they
made Rosa blanca, La (1955) and Tierra del fuego se apaga, La (1955).
Their last great film together was Rebelión de los colgados, La (1954).
The `60s led to a revival of government support for the industry in
the 1970s, which establish the base for a revival of Mexican art cinema
in the 1980s and `90s. El Indio continued directing films until 1979,
but when his collaboration with Figueroa ended in 1958, his reputation
suffered as the artistry of his pictures declined.
He began acting more, though he directed a picture every few years.
Gradually, the notoriety of his life began overtaking his reputation
as a filmmaker.
El Indio lived out the fantasy of perhaps every director when he shot
a critic because the critic had dissed one of his movies. He shot
and killed a farm laborer, an act which he claimed was in self-defense.
Convicted of manslaughter in 1976, he served six months of a four-and-a-half
year sentence.
By the 1960s, Fernandez's off-screen reputation as a violent man had
led to his typecasting as brutal villains in many Mexican and American
films. As an actor, Fernández appeared with his brother, actor Fernando
Fernandez, in John Ford's The Fugitive (1947), on which he also served
as associate producer.
Other American films in which he appeared were John Huston's The Unforgiven
(1960) (on which he also served as second unit director) and The Night
of the Iguana (1964), in which he played the barkeep, the John Wayne
pictures The War Wagon (1967) and Chisum (1970) (on which he also
served as second unit director), Sidney J. Furie's "The Appaloosa"
in which he had a supporting role to star Marlon Brando, and Burt
Kennedy's Return of the Seven (1966). |
After
playing Mexican General Mapache Juerta in director Sam Peckinpah's
classic The Wild Bunch (1969), Fernandez appeared in two other Peckinpah
films: as Paco in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), and as El
Jeffe, who gives the order Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974).
He was reunited with John Huston in Under the Volcano (1984) and appeared
in Roman Polanski's Pirates (1986).
El Indio's last two films as a writer-director were México Norte (1979)
and Erótica (1979), in which he also starred. |
|
Order
Here
The Wild Bunch
|
|
In all, Fernández
directed 43 pictures from 1942 to 1979. He was the credited screenwriter
on 40 pictures, starting with Cielito lindo (1936). He also served
as second unit director, both credited and uncredited, on such American
pictures shot in Mexico as The Magnificent Seven (1960), in which
he was attached to the American crew by the Mexican film industry
to ensure that the depictions of Mexicans were not racist or demeaning.
Fernández died in Mexico City on August 6, 1986.
In 2002, "La Perla" was named to the National Film Preservation Board's
National Film Registry, U.S. Library of Congress.
Emilio Fernández and his collaborator Gabriel Figuerora were honored
on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of El Indio's birth at the
inaugural Puerto Vallarta Film Festival of the Americas held in Puerto
Vallarta, Mexico in November 2004.
And the remarkable story of Emilio Fernández continues. |
|
|
