From raucous music-hall comedy to tough urban noir, this selection of digitally restored works showcases the range and artistry of a master craftsman of midcentury Mexican cinema.
Read full descriptionBAMPFA Student Committee Pick
Bracho’s 1960 passion project takes on the power struggles within Mexican politics after the Revolution, and was banned for over thirty years as a result. “Suffused with anguish and barely concealed outrage” (Village Voice).
Introduction by Diana Bracho
Bracho fuses populist romance and melodrama with formal experimentation in this over-the-top tale of a peasant woman torn between her revolutionary fiancé and a kindly store owner. Rita Macedo and Fernando Soler star in a classic of Mexican cinema’s Golden Age.
Arturo de Córdova and Gloria Marín star in this eroticized, nocturnal noir of shadows and desire, one of Mexican cinema’s great flores del mal. A progressive doctor fights an illicit, destructive passion for his best friend’s wife—and fails gloriously.
Labor activists, cabaret singers, and corrupt politicians stalk Mexico City in Bracho’s stylized, politicized film noir. With cinematography by Gabriel Figueroa and starring Pedro Armendáriz, it’s “an antifascist noir comparable to and in some ways superior to Casablanca” (J. Hoberman).
Bracho’s decades-spanning tale of two star-crossed lovers turns doomed romance into the highest of operatic entertainments, and showcases the charisma of legendary singer/actor Jorge Negrete, a.k.a. “El Charro Cantor.”
A not very grief-stricken young widow flutters her hand fan between a dashing young soldier and an elderly politician in Bracho’s lively debut, a brash musical comedy romance set in Mexico’s belle époque.