Round Up 1945, Part Two: What's up with Mexico?

As per usual, no useful information available in English at either the IMDB or AMG on Las Cinco Advertencias De Satanas, which has really got me curious about the fantasy film component of the apparently busy Mexican movie industry at this time. But curious enough to read a lot of machine translations of the only available information on the subject, with little prospect of ever being able to see the movies if they do sound worthwhile? What is it about these films that render them apparently below the radar for the English speaking world? Are they bad? Were their makers provincial and behind the times? If so, would that necessarily rob the films of interest? Or are they just victim to the cultural disregard for anything originating south of the U.S. border and therefore simply impossible to see in translation? For that matter, what is the state of Mexican film preservation? Do many of these films literally exist anymore to even be described, because a lot of Hollywood films from this period do not, having been shot on nitrate stock that has a habit of A) bursting into flames and B) turning to dust in a sealed film can. And, then, consider the BBC, who actually used to record over their videotaped archives of televised series simply to make space for new product.

Wikipedia says Mexican film makers were active from the silent era, but that most of what was produced prior to the 20's has been lost to time. Salvador Toscano Barragán is credited with having been Mexico's first film maker, and his (and his country's) first full length feature film a fantasy, an adaptation of the play Don Juan Tenorio. Despite this auspicious start for fantasy films in Mexico, Barragan was primarily a documentarist, his major subject the revolution, after the conclusion of which censorship weighed heavily on the growing industry, with strict political and moral strictures and a government dictated shift from non-fiction to light entertainment that ironically had the opposite effect of politicising film makers even further. In the 30's the country's industry began to pick up momentum and in the 40's entered what is now regarded as its golden age. Interestingly, genius Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein's visit to the country in 1930 is said to have been influential, presumably in regard to the stylistic editing that was his forte, which would argue against the idea that Mexican film making was unsophisticated. (The film he shot during that visit shows up in the 1998 documentary Sergei Eisenstein: Meksikanskaya Fantasiya.)

Film icons Cantinflas (known to the world as the Mexican Charlie Chaplin, though Charlie Chaplin regarded him simply as the greatest comedian in the world), and export Hollwood screen goddess Dolores Del Rio (pictured a couple of times somewhere nearby) emerged during this period, but from the Biased perspective things don't get really interesting until the advent of Spanish-Mexican master surrealist Luis Bunuel in 1950 with Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned). He would live in Mexico for the rest of his life, having relinquished his Spanish citizenship when he went to live there, and while there would direct the masterpiece political surrealist fantasy The Exterminating Angel (1962), in which bourgeois diners assembled for a banquet find that they can't seem to leave the dining room... So we've got him to look forward to, but for the time being it looks like information on Mexican fantasy film is going to be pretty scanty.

Crikey. I wonder what Dolores Del Rio's been in that I should see?