Quotes of the Day

"What can I tell you about Pedro Infante? If you're a Mejicana or Mejicano and don't know who he is, you should be tied to a hot stove with yucca rope and beaten with sharp dry corn husks as you stand in a vat of soggy fideos. If your racial and cultural ethnicity is Other, then it's about time you learned about the most famous of Mexican singers and actors."
—Denise Chavéz, from her 2002 novel Loving Pedro Infante

He was the Crosby, the Sinatra, the Elvis of Mexico. The top-of-the-charts love ballads he sang in films sent 10 million senoritas into ecstasy; he crooned, they swooned. The movies he starred in were among the most popular in Latin America; and one, the 1948 Nosotros los pobres...! (We the Poor) is the biggest hit in Mexican film history. He anchored cowboy comedies, historical-political epics and dozens of vein-popping romantic melodramas. He played virginal student-priests (in El Seminarista —The Seminarian) and rogues who at the crack of dawn rose from a lady's bed and jumped out the window (in Dicen que soy mujeriego —They Call Me a Ladies' Man). The good-hearted heroes he played fought, they cried and, always, they sang.

Infante, who looked like a cross between William Holden with a mustache and the young Eli Wallace in Baby Doll, was a man's man: a carpenter by trade and an amateur boxer for pleasure. (A grueling fight, as bloody and intense as anything in Raging Bull, serves as the climax to his 1953 Pepe el Toro.) He was a fanatic about his workout regimen. In a time when Hollywood movies rarely revealed much of their male stars below the collar, Pedro went topless in nearly every film, displaying the bulky muscularity he was so proud of. You could count on a scene where he had to change clothes, or wash up. He'd ripple his biceps on a prison work gang, get his top ripped off in a fight. In Angelitos Negros, an amazing document I'll get back to later, he performs a nightclub number stripped to the waist — in blackface (and blackchest, and blackback). Eva Perón had her descamisados, but up in Mexico, Pedro was the all-time shirtless one.

Presumably this flaunting of his body beautiful was for the women in the audience. Off-screen Infante was a dedicated ladies' man, with countless mistresses and one very patient spouse. Let Chavéz do the enumerating: "There was his first girlfriend, Lupita Marqués, who bore him a little girl. And then there was his long-suffering wife, María Luisa. Then came Lupe Torrentera, the young dancer he met when she was 14 and who bore him a daughter, Graciela Margarita, at age fifteen. Lupe was the mother of two of his other children. And, of course, there was Irma Dorantes, the young actress who starred in many of his movies and became the mother of his daughter, Irmita. The marriage to her was annulled the week before his death."

Infante's other passion was flying; he loved piloting his own plane. When he survived a crash in 1949, he got a metal plate in his head and a perverse sense of invincibility. "You see that I was right?" he boasted to friends. "Of course I felt something. But death can do nothing against me." He had two more crashes, and that was one too many. He died, at 39, on April 15, 1957. Hearing the news, Mexicans by the hundreds of thousands clogged the streets and reeled in grief. A newspaper headline blared: "His Death Was Like a Bomb in Everyone's Heart." The government declared a day of national mourning.

PEDRO INFANTE AND MEXICAN CINEMA

Until a few weeks ago, I knew nothing about Pedro Infante. But that's one of the cool things about seeing movies for a living: it's a school of continuing education, where school's never out. I got a fast graduate course watching the 10 old films and the tribute documentary ¡Así era Pedro Infante! (This Is Pedro Infante!), all from Rodriguez Brothers Productions, and most of them directed by Ismail Rodriguez, who guided Infante in 17 of his 62 movies. The "Colecció n Pedro Infante —Edició n de Homenaje" (Warner Home Video, all titles sold separately) not only clued me in to one of the major stars of Mexico's midcentury; it opened a window on the most vital, teeming movie industry south of Hollywood.

For Infante was an ornament of Mexico's Golden Age (La é poca de Oro del Cine Mejicano), a two-decade stretch of potent moviemaking. While the U.S. industry was importing Latin Americans like Ricardo Montalban, Carmen Miranda, José Iturbi and Fernando Lamas, Mexican beauty Dolores del Rio left Hollywood and returned home to join such new stars as Cantinflas, Pedro Armendáriz, María Félix and Infante's friendly rival in the singing hunk sweepstakes, Jorge Negrete. Emilio "El Indio" Fernández was directing movies that won international prizes, like the Cannes Palme d'Or. A renegade from Franco's Spain, the surrealist master Luis Buñuel, came to Mexico and made a string of startling social melodramas: Los Olvidados, Nazarin, The Exterminating Angel, Simon of the Desert. Among these giants, Infante stood proud.

On the new Infante releases, a cover sticker reads: "Por PRIMERA VEZ EN DVD EN EE. UU.!" (For the first time ever on DVD in the U.S.!) That's the first hint that this collection is aimed primarily at those Mexican-Americans who already know Infante as a legend or a loving memory —though it's available at amazon.com and, I'm assured, at Blockbuster and other large stores. Those of us who are linguistically impaired can get English subtitles for the movies; but the extras are in Spanish only. Also, the movies' visual quality ranges from mediocre to muddy. I've seen TV prints of Mexican films from the same period, like Fernández; La Perla and Maria Candelaria, and they gleam. But Las Islas Marias, the Infante-Fernández collaboration in the new collection (and shot, like the other two, by the great cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa), looks like a faded dupe.

But the vigor of these films is easy to spot; they move with such speed and confidence. They often begin in an efficient fury. Nosotros los pobres...! is a folk opera, a neorealist musical, opens with an elaborate production number, "Ni hablar, mujer," composed by Manuel Esperón, who wrote songs for 34 Infante films (and who, apparently, is still alive at 95). In a few mins., the film introduces us to two dozen characters with singing, strumming, speaking or whistling parts, as the camera glides, pans or swoops to keep up with them.

Or consider this scene at the start of the 1949 La Mujer que yo perdí (The Woman I Lost). A pretty young woman (Silvia Pinal, Buñuel's Viridiana), on an evening's stroll with her mother, is accosted by a young man she has rebuffed before. As he persists in his advances, her fiance (Infante) comes by and insists the man apologize. The man, identifying himself as the son of the attorney general, draws a gun. Infante knocks him down, the man's head hits the curb and blood gushes out. A newspaper headline screams: "Pedro Montaño Kills Attorney General's Son." Violent conflicts of class and devotion, duty and death are established and brought to a boil in this scene —which consumes exactly 38 secs. of screen time. It makes that YouTube synopsis of The Sopranos seem logy by comparison.

THE MAGIC OF MELODRAMA

In the '40s, Mexico was like Hollywood, or like India today: a national industry heavily invested in the romantic and domestic weepie, with fearless emoting, hairpin turns of fate, mega-doses of religious and family piety, all set to the popular songs of the day. (Melodrama literally means music drama.) Noble mothers are forever sacrificing themselves —silently, stoically, suicidally —for their kids. Fully three of the 10 Infante features end with some spiteful young person driving some dear old person to death, only to be flattened with a shocking revelation: "She's / he's your mother / father!" Cue tears that would flood the Rio Grande.

Politically, all sympathies are with the underclass. The gentry, the police, the law conspire against the working class. In The Woman I Lost, the Federales are rapacious: knocking down an old lady, stripping the blouse off a young woman, dragging a woman by the hair as she clutches her baby. Nosotros los pobres...! has the bad men stealing a child's dolly, and viciously kicking her grandmother —who just died! "Why has God forsaken us?" the child apostrophizes. "Is God only for rich people?"

Pedro, the proletarian man of honor, usually bears injustice bravely. Sometimes he volunteers for public censure, taking the rap for a crime of passion his sister committed in Las Islas Marias. Sometimes he's railroaded into jail by a scheming rival, as in Nosotros los pobres...! Only rarely, as in The Woman I Lost, does he take up arms against the corrupting power. On the run for an accidental killing the police think is murder, he becomes a Robin Hood of the countryside, reappropriating the money the landowners have stolen from the people.

He is strong, he is sensitive, but the movie Pedro often has a woman problem. At times a female will be too aggressive for him, like the smoldering, man-eating Katy Jurado in The Seminarian: "Are you retarded? Or are you afraid of me?" she asks as she brazenly removes her shawl. A more troubling blind spot in the Infante character: he keeps falling in love with racial snobs. In The Woman I Lost he becomes a fugitive for having protected Silvia Pinal's honor, only to find that she disdains the half-breed beauty who has saved his life. (She is played by Blanca Estela Pavón, Infante's love interest in six of his late '40s, who died in a plane crash in 1949, at 23). "You dirty Indian," Silvia hisses. "What do you know about love?" The Mexican audience knew to hiss back.

BLACK ANGELS

Like the U.S., Mexico had a race problem. With plentiful intermarrying between the indigenous population and the descendants of Spanish emigrés, the country was its own rainbow coalition, or contradiction. Most of the movie stars were light-skinned; those that weren't often played comic or villainous relief. But unlike Hollywood, Mexico didn't ignore the race issue. And in Joselito Rodriguez' Angelitos Negros (Little Black Angels), the prejudice of the invaders toward the natives, or anyone with native blood, is crucial, poignant and bizarre. Its script, by Rogelio A. González (from a play by the Cuban Felix B. Caignet), has to be recounted in a little detail to believed. After hearing it, you may still be incredulous.

Infante plays José Carlos, a popular singer who falls for Ana Luisa (Emilia Gulú), a schoolteacher who's very proper, very blond, very snooty to those of darker hue. She's downright rude to José Carlos' closest comrades: his Afro-Cuban bandmate, Fernando (Chimi Monterrey), and the band's sexy, dusky lead dancer, Isabel (Chela Castro), who clearly has a crush on the oblivious José Carlos. "You lower yourself dancing with that mulatta," Ana Luisa sneers, to which her color-blind beau replies, "It was God's decision that she's of mixed race." Ana Luisa also thinks that his performing in blackface is demeaning, but he shrugs that off with a laugh: "You're very lucky: You're being courted by two men. A white one by day and a black one by night." Plighting his troth, he declares, "Black, white, or with a striped face like a zebra, I love you very much."

As boy and girl get closer to marriage, unexpected opposition emerges from Ana Luisa's black maid Mercé (Rita Montaner), who has raised her selflessly since infancy; Ana Luisa believes she is an orphan. José Carlos, who has much more affection for Mercé than Ana Luisa does, tries charming her with odd endearments: "my soot cloud," "my little tar ball," and "You are a refined black lady, you were made of the finest coal where diamonds are extracted from." Her reason for fighting the betrothal is that she is Ana Luisa's mother, though she has never told the girl. Love has made Mercé endure both her maid status and the contempt her daughter sometimes shows her —as when she denies Mercé's plea to attend the wedding. (Ana Luisa also tells Fernando he's not welcome to be José Carlos' best man, or even come to the church. When Isabel asks why, he holds up his black hands and stares at them.)

A year later, a child is born: Belén, and her skin is dark. Ana Luisa, horrified, and fearful of being ostracized by her rich friends, blames José Carlos for having had black ancestors. Now would seem to be the time to tell Ana Luisa where she came from; but the doctor says her heart is too weak to take a severe shock. "I wish I could say it were my fault," the new father says of his baby girl. "Then I could proudly say she is from my black blood." Instead he promises Mercé he will keep silent: "You made a sacrifice for your daughter. I'll do the same for mine."

Belén is now four, with her father's (and grandmother's) loving disposition, but Ana Luisa still resents and recoils from her. "Why didn't God send me a white and blond girl?" she demands. "I would've loved her so much." (And Mercé asks, "What did black people do to make you hate us so much?") Desperate for affection from her mother, Belén puts pancake makeup on her face, saying, "I want to be white so mama will love me." Ana Luisa sees this pathetic travesty, and kisses Belén for the first time.

Now the tensions boil over, the ironic dialogue gets hotter. Ana Luisa exclaims, in agony, "Oh, if only my mother were alive!" and, in anger, "I'd kill myself if my mother were black." (Hearing that, José Carlos slaps her.) Mercé, ground down by the ill feelings, is getting weaker. And when Ana Luisa calls her a "damn black woman" and strikes her," José Carlos shouts the words the movie has been steaming toward: "Don't! She is your mother!" Revelation; guilt; death; renewal. Sensation.

Pretty amazing, huh? But the story isn't the strangest thing about Angelitos Negros. The casting is. Except for Monterrey, all the actors playing African or mixed-race characters were white. The movie is a parable of race hatred and racial understanding, done in blackface. As such, and because it is played with such ferocious conviction, the film is a not-to-be-missed one-of-a-kind.

One can quibble about plot anomalies. If having a black child was a scourge to someone passing as white, why wouldn't José Carlos' career have been blighted? For that matter, why does he stay with this awful woman, when the much more comely and congenial Isabel is panting to take her place? The answer must be: Because it's a parable, stupid. But also because Infante has a natural nobility that explains why  José Carlos (J.C. for short) remains loving through this Calvary of abuse. In so many of his films, a Pedro smile or tear or grimace  make the wildest plot twist plausible (almost). A great spirit must endure great suffering. His silent soldiering-on here is no less heroic than the dreadful beating he takes, and then dishes out, during the Pepe el Toro boxing match. As the ringside announcer says with awe in that movie, "His heart is so big, his chest can't contain it."

GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. BUT NOT GONE?

The Pedro Infante collection will eventually span 23 features. Now that my appetite is stoked, I'd like to catch up with Dos tipos de cuidado (The Troublesome Two), his only film co-starring Jorge Negrete, and the 1956 Tizoc, his last big movie and the only one he made with Maria Felix. There's also "Los tres huastecos (Three Guys from La Huasteca), in which Pedro plays three roles: a stalwart Army captain, a violin-playing priest and a lumpen atheist. In one film planned at the time of his death, Infante was to play seven different characters.

There were supposedly discussions about his coming to Hollywood. But those and all other dreams were cut short when he died. Or did he? In the myth of the hero, death is often only a pause before resurrection. "Some say Pedro Infante still lives," Chavéz writes. "Some say he was killed in the plane crash. Some say the left side of his face was mutilated and that he now lives in hiding (age 87) in the Sierra Nevadas. Some say he was having an affair with the President of Mexico's mistress and the Mexican mafia was after him and he had to go into hiding. ... I just heard from a friend in El Paso that she knows someone with impeccable credentials who has testified for sure that Pedro did not die on that plane! And not only that, but her friend has lunch with him three or four times a year!"

So Elvis lives, and Pedro didn't perish. Watching some of Infante's movies may not make you cultists, but when it comes to Mexico's La Época de Oro del Cine, you'll be a believer.

• Richard Corliss