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Critic’s Notebook
A Lincoln Center retrospective highlights mid-century films aimed at audiences that continue to influence filmmakers.
By Carlos Aguilar
Charitable charlatans, clumsy womanizers, enigmatic ladies 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-20th century.
An era of prolific productions across genres and stars reaping the benefits of exclusive studio contracts, rivaled Hollywood’s formula in the quality and variety of its output. Today, the maximum of Mexican local productions struggle to find their place on the 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 earmarked for the war effort, Mexican corporations saw an opportunity to produce films for and about their own country. which may also be shown in other Spanish-speaking territories.
With titles largely from this period, the retrospective “Everyday Show: Mexican Popular Cinema” opens Friday at Film at Lincoln Center. Entertainment aimed at the general public, these films focused their attraction on unlikely heroes and heroines who, despite their personality quirks or individual circumstances, demonstrated a strong ethical compass and unwavering pride. They (for the most part) do what is right in the end, 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 these films have endured in the collective Mexican 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 a stopover at my grandmothers’ house, for whom the men and women then appearing on the small screen had been larger than life in their youth. .
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