Mexican Cinema Is Fading Out

During the Mexican film industry’s golden age, from the 1930s to the mid-1950s, stars such as Pedro Infante, Cantinflas, Maria Felix and Dolores Del Rio spread tales of machismo, glamour and rustic innocence to every corner of the Latino world.

Turning out such classics as the urban melodrama “Nosotros Los Pobres” (1947), the small-town fable “Alla en el Rancho Grande” (1936) and the tragic “Los Olvidados” (1950), the industry’s five studios propagated Mexican culture and instilled national pride--and employed tens of thousands in and around Mexico City. Film exports ranked as the third-largest generator of foreign trade.

But the once-glorious Mexican film industry has faded nearly to black--a victim of Hollywood’s overpowering influence, changing tastes and the stultifying effects of a government film monopoly that took over production, distribution and theaters in the early 1950s and that only recently has been broken up.

Audiences have dwindled, talent has fled, and the industry’s output tumbled last year to a meager five films--from an average of 80 in the 1950s and a peak of 120 as recently as 1988.

There are glimmers of hope, radiating largely from the worldwide success of “Like Water for Chocolate,” the 1993 romantic fantasy directed by Alfonso Arau that set a U.S. box office record for a foreign-language movie. Also, a recent expansion of theater screens in Mexico is reversing a decades-long decline, and private investment in Mexican movies has been growing since 1991--though from a tiny base.

No one disputes the artistic credentials of some of the nation’s directors. Mexican films took two of three top prizes at last month’s Latin American Film Festival in Havana. The first-prize winner, “El Callejon de Los Milagros,” directed by Jorge Fons, successfully transplanted Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s offbeat urban love stories to Mexico City.

Other directors have scored international hits in recent years. Maria Novaro’s “Danzon” (1991) spun a tale about love lost and found on a Mexico City dance floor. Roberto Sneider’s 1994 black comedy, “Dos Crimenes,” won numerous film festival prizes.

But as an industry, Mexican movies are more shadow than light. Only one of the five movie studios from the 1950s is still dedicated to films. Talented actors have migrated to telenovelas, or soap operas--those who can find work, that is. About 35,000 industry jobs--more than half--have been lost in seven years. While Mexican soaps are hugely successful and seen in 30 countries, they carry little cultural impact or significance.

Perhaps saddest for those who remember film’s glory years is that no new crop of stars has emerged to replace the icons of yore. The intensity of Mexicans’ feelings for their idols is apparent every April 15 when fans young and old gather in the capital’s Pantheon Garden cemetery to observe the anniversary of Infante’s death in a 1957 airplane crash. The crowds swap memories, conjure up Infante’s Mexicanidad, or Mexican-ness, and sing some of the ballads that he made famous in his movies.

For many, Infante embodied the Mexican myth, a “symbol of the century . . . a macho who can weep, a bodybuilder and a singer, simpatico and charismatic. He could play a peasant revolutionary, bandit or worker in the slums,” said Carlos Monsivais, co-author of “A Traves Del Espejo,” or “Through the Mirror,” a book on the golden age of Mexican movies.

While acknowledging the more recent successes by Arau and others, Guadalupe Loaeza, an author and cultural columnist for the Mexico City newspaper Reforma, says good Mexican films remain too few.

“The films of the golden age reaffirm our nationalism and make us nostalgic for that era, that Mexico,” Loaeza said. “I can’t explain why, after producing such great . . . movies, how we fell into such incredible mediocrity.”

Shift in Popular Tastes

What went wrong? Monsivais says it was a matter of popular tastes shifting in the 1950s away from the simple and innocent plots that dominated the films of the golden age. With the introduction of sophisticated U.S. and European movies, the Mexican middle class came to “abhor machismo, the picturesque and naive,” the author said. The old Mexican myths began to ring hollow.

Others blame the state-owned monopoly, which began with the best of intentions to promote the industry and protect it against European and Hollywood encroachment. But by imposing ticket price controls, political censorship and favoritism over several decades, the government slowly wrung private initiative and creativity out of the business, said Gonzalo Elvira, a second-generation producer and head of the Assn. of Mexican Film Producers and Distributors.

Over the past five years, the government has loosened its grip, part of the move to privatize state-owned industries that is sweeping Latin American countries. The government hopes private enterprise can rebuild what is left of the once-flourishing Mexican dream machine.

The move is a tacit acknowledgment that the industry was created by entrepreneurs such as producer-directors Ismael Rodriguez, Fernando Fuentes and Gregorio Wallerstein. They were helped by an influx of European talent fleeing World War II and the semi-dormant state of wartime Hollywood that created an enormous market vacuum for films in Latin America.

Although Cuba and Argentina also had movie industries, Mexico became the dominant producer of Spanish-language films during and after the war, partly because of its proximity to Hollywood’s talent and technology and also because actors’ Mexican accents were more acceptable to Latino audiences.

But that was 50 years ago. Hollywood, which now makes 80% of the world’s movies, has become too strong a taste-maker for even some well-established European filmmakers to withstand.

“Mexicans want to see the same movies that are hot in Tokyo, New York and London,” said Eduardo Machtus, head of United International Pictures, Mexico’s largest film distributor. “They want to see special effects and million-dollar budgets, and those aren’t being done in Mexico.”

Box office receipts back Machtus up. Mexico’s five top-grossing movies in 1995 were Spanish-dubbed versions of “Batman Forever,” “Casper,” “Congo,” “Waterworld” and “Pocahontas.”

Nor does it help that Mexican audiences are shrinking. While the population soared by 70% over the two decades ending in 1990, the number of movie screens has dropped by 60%.

Moviegoers are increasingly turning to videos for entertainment, repelled partly by the deteriorating condition of the mostly government-owned theaters. The overwhelmingly violent and soft-core pornographic content of Mexican movies in the 1980s also drove mainstream crowds away, producer Elvira said, in a rejection of filmmakers’ attempts to exploit border drug violence and sex.

Foreign production companies haven’t picked up the slack. Despite the weak peso and stimulus of the North American Free Trade Agreement that would seem to make Mexico an inviting locale for offshore producers, only six foreign movies were shot here last year, down from 11 in 1994.

“We expected 20. Why so few came, I would like to know,” said Patricia Millet, president of Mexico’s National Film Chamber and granddaughter of Fernando de Fuentes, the director who learned his craft in Hollywood’s Pathe Studios in the 1920s before returning home to make classics, including “Alla en el Rancho Grande.”

Millet conceded that the peasant uprising in the state of Chiapas, assassinations and other signs of political instability probably played a role in discouraging foreign film companies from coming.

Hard-to-Sell Theaters

The government’s efforts to privatize the industry have not been a smash either. It put nearly 440 theaters on the block in 1993 but found takers for only 170, Millet said. Many had been closed for years and were in shabby condition, she said.

The revitalization effort is also lagging because the industry’s talent base is severely depleted. Successful artists such as Arau, whose “Like Water For Chocolate” grossed $21.7 million in the United States and about $4 million in Mexico, typically move on to Hollywood.

Conditions being what they are, Mexican filmmakers “don’t make movies, they make miracles,” Arau said in an interview. His first U.S.-produced movie, “A Walk in the Clouds,” was released in August and has grossed $85 million worldwide.

“ ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ opened the doors for Mexican film,” Arau said. “It was the crossover into Hollywood and Latin America. Now the danger is, there haven’t been any movies since that show the possibility for continuing in that direction.”

Other directors who have gone on to Hollywood after scoring Mexican triumphs include Sneider, Luis Mondoki and Alfonso Cuaron. Salma Hayek, the actress who starred in “El Callejon de Los Milagros,” the Havana festival’s top winner, has already launched her Hollywood career, appearing recently with Antonio Banderas in “Desperado.”

Mexico isn’t alone in losing a once-flourishing film industry to government interference. Brazil has suffered the same fate, said Redo Farah, vice president for Latin America at the Burbank-based Warner Bros. International film distribution company.

“Hollywood is making all the pictures, and it’s the only industry that isn’t subsidized,” Farah said.

Cost of Government Control

In Mexico’s case, the industry’s doom may have been sealed as long ago as 1953, when the government took over worldwide distribution of Mexican films.

The government formed the National Cinema Bank to finance the bulk of the industry’s output, forbidding private banks to bankroll movies. It bought studios and then most of the movie theaters, slowly eliminating private initiative and using the movie industry to promote social causes and reward cronies, Millet said.

Ultimately, the control gave way to favoritism and censorship, reaching a low point in the late 1970s when the sister of Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo assumed control. Her tenure was known as the zona de desastre, or disaster era.

The worst blow occurred in 1991 when Peliculas Mexicanas, the distribution arm that handled 85% of the industry’s output, declared bankruptcy, leaving 450 people without jobs--and many film producers without an outlet. Two studios closed soon thereafter, Elvira said.

At the same time, Mexican movies were losing a huge portion of their U.S. audience as the number of Spanish-language theaters in the United States dropped from 500 in the early 1980s to fewer than 20 today.

Millet and author Monsivais blame the decline on immigration authorities’ arrests of undocumented Mexicans outside U.S. theaters in the 1980s. Going to the movies began carrying the risk of deportation, so people stayed away, she said. Meanwhile, the movie tastes of Mexican emigres changed as they became more Americanized.

Today, the remaining filmmakers try to adapt. Elvira said his family-owned Orofilms, which has made 170 movies over 50 years, is hanging on by producing movies in video, then selling them directly to distributors who supply rental shops in Mexico and the United States.

At a cost of about $60,000, compared to $500,000 for a theatrical release, a video action movie is a far cry artistically from “El Ultimo Cuple,” the 1956 classic starring Spanish actress Sara Montiel and produced by Elvira’s father. But he’s surviving.

Can Mexico’s film industry recapture its former magic?

Some say it needs new stars--a new Pedro Infante. Some say producers must pursue the art-house market niche. And some call for home-based financing to re-create the entrepreneurial impulse that served the industry in the 1930s.

“If there is financing, there are movies,” Arau said, “and if there are movies, there are stars.”

Kraul is a Times staff writer and Darlington a Times Mexico City Bureau researcher.