The Mexican Everyman : Cantinflas and Mario Moreno: Two Faces of One Culture

Cantinflas, the actor who rose from the humblest tent shows in the 1930s Mexican barrios to become the century’s greatest symbol of popular culture in the Spanish-language world, is dead. With his death, the star system that created the movie industry in Mexico is inexorably coming to its natural end.

The fact that both the beginning of Cantinflas’ career and the birth of the movie industry in Mexico happened almost simultaneously was not a mere coincidence.

Cantinflas--born Mario Moreno--began his career in the carpas, tent shows that were placed in vacant lots across the populous barrios in the city and whose audience was composed of low-wage workers who lived in the neighborhood. The stage was shared with singers, dancers, magicians, clowns and comics who delivered short sketches based on the albur --an old form of double-entendre speech that celebrates sex, rejoices in scatology and makes fun of people.

Through language and pantomime, Cantinflas was able to create a new genre and transform the albur into a new form of speech whose foundation was basically nonsense. But this is a nonsense that, while saying nothing, at the same time communicates much.

Cantinflas’ speech, like jazz, was based on improvisation. It was a speech that frequently proposed, “Listen not to what I tell you, but to what I mean to tell you.” It has been suggested by some authors that Cantinflas’ mastery of improvisation was, most likely, a product of necessity--given the lack of script writers at the time in Mexico City.

To communicate, Cantinflas also used mime. The gelatin-like movement began with the head swaying to skip a nonexisting blow, and reverberated through the long and once-white undershirt from which a torn piece of fabric hung, pretending to be a raincoat. It continued under the oversized pants tied under the waist, and finished in the shaking feet semi-covered by worn-out shoes. The revolving movement of arms and hands, the eternal expression of incredulity in the eyes, the arching of the eyebrows and the permanent smile on his face were essential to reinforce the speech.

The people in the carpa, and later in formal theaters, gave him the measure of his artistic value and provided him with an invaluable source of inspiration. Demanding vociferously their money’s worth, the carpa audience had fun and found relaxation in a peculiarly Mexican way: “echando relajo” --goofing around. Cantinflas knew very well how to read the public and he gave them exactly what they wanted: a character who was one of them, perhaps even less than them, but who always managed to succeed--or at least get out of trouble.

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Mexico City in the ‘30s was a small place and it did not take long for the city to learn of the existence of this funny character. Cantinflas became the first comic known citywide, and he made sure to keep in close contact with the public in the carpa , while at the same time effectively using the expanding new medium in the country: motion pictures.

Throughout the main and most interesting part of his career, Cantinflas’ main character went through a series of metamorphoses. He took some of the characteristics of the Mexican pelado, the penniless lumpen-proletariat widely considered a sinister character, tamed him and created a softer version--the peladito, who proved to be much more palatable to the rich and growing middle class, while keeping his appeal to the poor people.

By the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, Cantinflas alternated between the carpa and the movies and soon became the first nationally known comic. In his time, there were, arguably, better comics. None rose to the same heights because Mario Moreno Cantinflas was two very different people: Moreno, the shrewd entrepreneur who managed the perfect career; and Cantinflas, the peladito who everybody loved.

There are many accounts of the times when this dual personality arose and Moreno would wonder how Cantinflas would answer a question or make a decision. He gave us an example of this duality in his own account of how the trademark began: “At the carpa, once I felt a sudden lapse of stage fright. For a moment, Mario Moreno became paralyzed. Unexpectedly, Cantinflas took charge of the situation and began to talk. Desperately, he lisped words and more words, nonsensical words and sentences, foolish things--anything to defend himself from the attack of the audience and to escape an embarrassing situation. The audience remained silent, stunned, unable to understand his words. But soon they began to laugh, softly at first and then turning into a loud explosion. Right then, I knew I had won.”

But Mexico was too small for the two talented characters who had realized the continental appeal of the peladito. Cantinflas had named himself the representative of the poor people and Mario Moreno had become a prosperous entrepreneur in the growing Mexican film industry. The partnership with Columbia Pictures to distribute his films in Latin America allowed both Cantinflas and Moreno to conquer new spaces and broaden the appeal of the peladito to either the representatives of the Lima oligarchy or the slum dwellers of Buenos Aires.

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There was, however, a brave new world market to conquer and Cantinflas wanted a piece of it. Mike Todd’s extravaganza “Around the World in 80 Days” signaled the way. And even though the film was awful, Cantinflas/Passpartout passed the test, at least temporarily. The movie “Pepe,” Cantinflas’ next U.S. film, turned out to be a complete failure and the globe proved to be too big even for this great one.

By the time of this aborted international adventure, Cantinflas/Moreno had entered into their last artistic/entrepreneurial phase in Mexico, doing basically the same film year after year and eluding the exchange with the people that started in the carpa. The businessman prevailed over the artist. The last pictures that Cantinflas/Moreno produced were enormous financial successes, but did not achieve the level of creativity that was so plentiful in the earliest movies. Money was coming by inertia: the name, the publicity, the public relations, the distribution, the know-how were all there, but the loss of the live audience made him lose the magic touch.

Ernest Hemingway in “A Moveable Feast” confesses that when the rich discovered him, he stopped writing seriously. In the case of Cantinflas, he was the rich. He was the one who became famous and turned the craft that made him a star into a caricature of himself.

Fortunately, in that golden period from the late ‘30s to the mid-’40s, Cantinflas re-created for us the essential images of life in Latin America, and it is this Cantinflas that will remain forever with us.