——UPGRADED——
The ever-popular Maria Felix stars as a white woman who enters into a romance with a Mexican Indian, played by singing star Pedro Infante (who died shortly after the film’s completion). The racial barriers between the lovers prove to be insurmountable, resulting in tragedy. Director Ismael Rodriguez spends a great deal of time establishing the folklore and traditions of Infante’s people, much to the fascination of his audience.
Probably the most delightful Cantinflas movie ever made, Cantinflas goes from the streets of Mexico to the fabulous palaces of the Far East. Overnight, he becomes a Caliph, then a magician, then several other fascinating characters, each one providing another facet of Cantinflas’ unique human comedy.
The life of the famed Mexican bullfighter Luis Procuna, from his boyhood through his training and the triumphs that followed as Procuna rose to the peak of his profession.
A criminal organization hires some ninjas to steal the formula for a new drug, described as cheaper and more powerful than cocaine. As it turns out, the industrialist who financed the research has taken elaborate steps to make sure that the new substance won’t fall into the wrong hands, and the ninjas find they have only succeeded in stealing half the formula. To please their disgruntled employers, the evil ninjas try to blackmail the industrialist into handing over the remaining half and it’s up to the Mexican Ninja and his pals to stop him.
A man tricked into enlisting in the Confederate army is later thrown into a hellish stockade on desertion charges. He eventually breaks out of the prison camp, reunites with his old partner and sets out to kill the man who was responsible for his being in the camp in the first place. However, after accidentally killing a Confederate officer, he finds himself pursued by a gang of vicious bounty hunters intent on collecting the reward put up by the dead officer’s widow.
The film is related from the point of view of Alsino, an impoverished Nicaraguan lad. While his country and its rotting buildings crumble all around him, the idealistic Alsino imagines himself to be a condor, flying far above his deprivations. It is during one of his hallucinations that Alsino jumps from a tree; the fall cripples him, turning him into a hunchback. He will only straighten out to his full proud height upon joining a guerilla band, fighting the corrupt government armies. Significantly, Alsino & the Condor was the first production to be filmed in Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolution and the overthrow of Somoza.
The controversial, sexy, surreal story of a messenger and his journey and encounters with many historical events and people like Auschwitz, the Ku Klux Klan, Frida Kahlo, Cortés and Emiliano Zapata (as a beautiful woman!).
