Emilio Fernández(1904-1986)
- Actor
- Writer
- Director
Emilio "El Indio" Fernandez Romo is the most famous person in the history
of Mexican movies. For an era he symbolized Mexico due to his violent
machismo, rooted in the Revolution of 1910-17, and because of his
staunch commitment to Mexican cultural nationalism. Born to a Mexican (Mestizo) father
and a Native American Kickapoo mother, Emilio was himself the "mestizaje" (mestizo)
that his films would later glorify.
The teenaged Fernandez abandoned his studies to serve as an officer in
the Huertista rebellion, which broke out on 12/4/1923, led by
Gen. Adolfo de la Huerta. On July 20th of that year,
Pancho Villa had been ambushed and
murdered; one theory was that the killing was done by agents of Mexican
President Álvaro Obregón. Obregon, when
he served as a general during the revolution, had defeated Villa in
four successive battles collectively known as the Battle of Celaya,
which was the largest military confrontation in Latin-American history
before the 1982 Falklands War.
Under the Constitution of 1917 that Obregon himself helped write,
Mexican presidents could not succeed themselves (Obregon would later
have the constitution amended so he could serve a second,
non-consecutive term; after winning the presidential election of 1928,
he was assassinated before his inauguration). Obregon had won the
presidency in 1920 after inciting a successful military revolt against
President Venustiano Carranza, who
had planned on naming Ignacio Bonillas as his successor instead of
Obregon, who believed that he deserved it. The revolt began when the
governor of the state of Sonora, Gen. Huerta, broke with President
Carranza and declared the secession of Sonora. This was a signal for
the beginning of the successful uprising against Carranza, led by
Obregon and supported by Gen. Plutarco Elías Calles. After
Carranza was killed in an ambush, Huerta served as provisional
president of Mexico from 6/1/1920 to 12/1/1920, until elections
could be held. When Obregon won the federal election, Huerta became
Minister of Finance in the new government.
Huerta considered himself the natural successor to President Obregon,
just as Obregon had considered himself Carranza's natural successor.
The murdered Villa was seen as an ally of Huerta, who had publicly
announced his candidacy for the presidency. Obregon, however, planned
to remain in power by handpicking his successor, a tradition that
lasted throughout 20th-century Mexican politics. When he named his
anti-clerical Minister of the Interior, the former Gen. Calles, as his
heir, Huerta rose up in a rebellion that eventually affected half of
the Mexican army. Like Huerta a native of Sonora and a former general
in the Mexican army, Calles had preceded him as governor and military
ruler of their home state from 1915-16. Huerta thought his service and
loyalty to Obregon should have brought him the presidency, but Mexican
presidents, not allowed to succeed themselves and limited (mostly) to
one term, tried to extend their power by naming political puppets as
successors (Calles would outdo Obregon by controlling the Mexican
presidency outright or through puppets from 1924-34).
The rebellion was a serious threat to Obregon, but he was able to quash
it by using loyal army units, battalions of workers and farmers and
intervention by the US. By the time the revolt ended in March 1924, 54 generals
and 7,000 soldiers were gone, either killed in battle, executed, exiled
or dismissed. Obregon banished Huerta to exile in the US (where he
lived in Los Angeles, supporting himself as a music teacher). This was
the cauldron of violence and nationalism in which the young Fernandez
came into his manhood. He received a 20-year prison sentence for his
participation in the rebellion on the losing side. Escaping prison by
following Huerta into exile in Los Angeles, Fernandez absorbed the
rudiments of filmmaking as a bit player and extra working in Hollywood
in the 1920s and early 1930s. With the election of
Lázaro Cárdenas as president in 1934,
the Huertista rebels were granted an amnesty (Huerta himself was
recalled from exile by Cardenas in 1935 and served in several posts,
including Inspector General of Foreign Consulates and Director General
of Civil Pensions). Fernandez returned to Mexico in 1934 and began
working in the Mexican movie industry as a screenwriter and actor. His
Indian looks, which gave him his nickname "El Indio," also brought him
his first lead role, playing an Indian in
Janitzio (1935). Due to his imposing
physical presence and Indian countenance, El Indio was cast as bandits,
charros (cowboys) and revolutionaries.
The Cardenas government of 1934-40 established the framework in which
the "Golden Age of Mexican Cinema" could be realized. The political
system that dominated Mexico for over half a century was consolidated
during his regime. The government incorporated trade unions, campesino
(peasant) organizations and middle-class professionals and office
workers into the ruling Party of the Mexican Revolution (later the
Party of the Institutional Revolution, or PRI). Cardenas oversaw the
redistribution of millions of acres of land to peasants and the
expansion of collective bargaining rights and wage increases to
workers.
Cardenas and all subsequent PRM/PRI presidents (all presidents of
Mexico in the 20th century beginning with Calles were PRM/PRI members;
Vicente Fox was the first from outside the
party in three-quarters of a century) maintained political control of
Mexico by granting favors and concessions to their constituencies
inside the corporatist party structure in exchange for worker and
campesino organizations delivering votes and suppressing discontent
among their constituencies. The PRM/PRI itself created an
organizational structure for the government that allowed citizens
access to the political realm, in the sense that they could interface
with government agencies. Once inside the government machine, seeking
redress, favors, etc., the non-connected citizen was led through a maze
of layers of bureaucracy that never permitted a satisfactory result.
Citizens caught in the maze were eventually frustrated and discouraged,
but the ingenious if disingenuous system worked as it gave them
input--just no guaranteed output. By frustrating them within an
institutional structure, the PRM/PRI governments--both federal and
state--took the fight out of them. The PRM/PRI sought to control
frustration that had led to violence in the past, particularly among
the generals who had the power to destabilize the society and economy.
That government structure thus served as a homeostatic device for the
people's frustration, relieving it and never allowing it to build up
again into a revolutionary situation.
Cardenas' most notable achievement arguably was the nationalization of
Mexico's oil industry. After unsuccessfully trying to negotiate better
terms with Mexican Eagle--the holding company owned by Royal
Dutch/Shell and Standard Oil of New Jersey--Cardenas nationalized
Mexico's petroleum reserves and expropriated the equipment of the
foreign oil companies on 3/18/38. A spontaneous six-hour parade
broke out in Mexico City to celebrate the event. Unlike
Fidel Castro's nationalization of
foreign assets in Cuba, Shell and SONJ were compensated for their
expropriated assets. Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) and the Mexican model
became a beacon for other oil-producing nations seeking to gain control
over their own energy resources from foreign companies. Cardenas
was the only PRM/PRI president who did not enrich himself while in office. After
retiring as Minister of Defense in 1945--the post he took after
relinquishing the presidency--he assumed a modest lifestyle. He spent
the last years of his life supervising irrigation projects and
promoting education and free medical care for the poor. This was the
man who set the tone of the modern Mexico that arose from the
revolution and civil wars of the 1920s, who cleared the ground for the
economic boom of the 1940s in which the "Golden Age of Mexican
Cinema" reached its apogee. Classic Mexican cinema has mostly been
ignored in the US due to the language barrier and a colonialist mindset
suffused with racism. When Mexican cinema has been addressed by
those north of the border, the primary focus fell on the brilliant
cinematography of
Gabriel Figueroa, who shot
films for John Ford and
John Huston, or on former Hollywood
star Dolores Del Río. Fernandez's
reputation was so great that he was even appreciated in the US in his
lifetime, but his notoriety as a sort of wildman of the Mexican movie
industry and his appearance as an actor in
Sam Peckinpah's
The Wild Bunch (1969) overshadowed
his greatness as a director. While Mexico has often served as a locale
for American films--the genres of sweet (white) young things imperiled
by swarthy Mexican bandits and of Americans in revolutionary Mexico, to say
nothing of Zorro and The Cisco Kid--have been part of the Yankee cinema
since the East Coast-based film companies began relocating to southern
California in the early 1910s. Gringo
Warner Baxter won the second Oscar ever
awarded for Best Actor playing The Cisco Kid in a role originally
intended for Raoul Walsh, of all people.
Mexico has been the site of such blockbuster films as
Viva Villa! (1934),
Juarez (1939),
Viva Zapata! (1952),
Vera Cruz (1954),
The Professionals (1966) and
"The Wild Bunch," but except for
La caza del oro (1972), a
Johnny-Come-Lately to the genre, they seldom featured Mexican actors in
anything other than bit parts, if at all, with the exception of
Anthony Quinn, one of the few
Mexican-Americans to achieve superstar status. Mexican performers taken
up by Hollywood --such as
Ramon Novarro,
Rita Hayworth,
John Gavin and
Raquel Welch--were, like half-Mexican
baseball great Ted Williams (born
in San Diego), de-ethnicized in a sort of cultural ethnic cleansing.
Salma Hayek, who is of mixed Mexican and
Lebanese parentage, is arguably the first Mexican since
Lupe Velez and Dolores del Rio to cross over
as a Hollywood superstar and remain identifiably Mexican (even at the
dawn of a new millennium, she was urged by her Hollywood agents to play
up her Arabic ethnicity, even with anti-Arab feeling rife in Hollywood
and the US at large--their "reasoning" was that no one would go see a
Mexican in movies since their cleaning ladies were Mexican),
Until the 1990s, with
Like Water for Chocolate (1992)
("Like Water for Chocolate"), Mexican films themselves seldom strayed
in the Yankee consciousness, except for the rare one like
The Pearl (1947), based on a novel by
Californian John Steinbeck and a
prize-winner at the Venice Film Festival. "La Perla" was directed by
Fernandez, the greatest director to come out of Mexico's golden age of
cinema. The first Mexican feature was released in 1906, though
production often was eclipsed by political and economic conditions.
There were documentaries made about the Mexican Revolution in the
1910s, but very few films were made in the 1920s.
Sergei Eisenstein's trip to
Mexico in the early 1930s to make
Que Viva Mexico (1979),
which remained unfinished due to his problems with his American backer,
Upton Sinclair, injected a new enthusiasm
into the Mexican movie industry.
While most American film historians place the Golden Age firmly in the
1940s--some specifically assigning it to the period 1943-46 and others
extending it until the mid-'50s--the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema
properly stretches back to 1936, peaks in the mid-'40s (when the
Mexican cinema receives international recognition; two of
Fernandez's films won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and
were nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festivals) and
terminates in the
mid-'50s, with the
end of Fernandez's 25-film collaboration with cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. Figueroa, the Mexican movie industry's first great director, inaugurated the
Golden Age in 1936 with two hits,
Out on the Big Ranch (1936)
("Out at Big Ranch") and
Let's Go with Pancho Villa (1936)
("Let's Go with Pancho Villa"). Both were "political message" movies
addressing the social and cultural issues lying at the heart of Mexican
Revolution. "Vamonos con Pancho Villa" has the distinction of being the
first feature produced at the Mexican government-subsidized studio
Cinematografica Latino Americana S.A., while "Allá en el Rancho Grande"
made Tito Guízar a star. Guizar eventually
became the Mexican movie industry's first superstar by playing in the
"comedias rancheras" (ranch comedies) genre that was the most popular
type of film in Mexico in the 1930s. A hit with audiences throughout
Latin America, "comedias rancheras" were set in an idyllic,
pre-revolutionary Mexico. The vaudevillian Mario Moreno, who became a
Latin-American superstar under the name
Cantinflas, made his short-subject debut in
1936 and would soon become the Latin-American film industry's leading
comedian when he made his feature-film debut in
You're Missing the Point (1940)
("There is the Detail"). The Cantinflas character is rooted in the
image of the "pelado," or poor white trash, and his character deflates
respectable society through his sharp repartee. Peace--i.e., a lack of
overt domestic political turmoil--laid the groundwork for the
development of a truly popular indigenous cinema in the 1930s and '40s. The comedias rancheras and Cantinflas comedies helped make the
Mexican cinema commercially viable. With Hollywood distracted by
turning out propaganda and military training films during World War II,
there was an opening in Latin America that the Mexican industry filled.
Without competition from Hollywood, the Mexican movie industry
dominated Latin-American cinemas for most of the decade. Movie
production tripled in the 1940s compared to the previous decade. The
Mexican film industry underwent a consolidation and developed a star
system, some of whom crossed over to achieve international recognition.
The peak of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema came in the 1940s, spurred
by rapid industrialization and a resulting affluence--although inequitably
distributed--caused by trade with the US, as World War II boosted
American demand for Mexican raw materials. The Mexican movie industry
became the world's largest producer of Spanish-language films, helped
by the fact that the other large producers, Argentina and Spain, were
headed by fascist governments. Though the Mexican government was
conservative and repressive in the 1940s, it encouraged the production
of nationalist films that helped articulate a Mexican identity.
During the 1940s Mexican movie stars and directors became popular
icons, and some even became public figures with effective political
influence. Among the movie stars blossoming during the decade were
Dolores del Rio, Pedro Infante,
Jorge Negrete,
Joaquín Pardavé and
María Félix, while Fernandez and Figueroa
became globally known. Luis Buñuel moved to
Mexico and would direct some of the country's major movies in the
following decade.
Mexican movies typically were genre pictures, melodramas, romances,
musicals, comedies and horror, which addressed all aspects of Mexican
society, from love stories about the "lumpen proletariat" to dramas
about the Indians. Mexican movies are a mirror of Mexican society,
including history (19th-century dictator
Porfirio Díaz and his court, The
Revolution and Villa and
Emiliano Zapata), obsessions
(both familial and erotic) and mythology (Indian and big-city culture).
Mexican cinema did this using the classic genres of the the melodrama,
the comedy (in its romantic, musical and ranchera versions, and
slapstick and farce) and even the horror film. With its proximity to
Hollywood, and the fact that many leading lights of the Mexican cinema
were familiar with Hollywood production values, the indigenous movie
industry set a high standard for itself, as it had to measure up to
Hollywood product.
Fernandez made his motion picture debut as an actor in
Chano Urueta's
El destino (1928), but his early work
in movies was in American westerns churned out by Monogram director
John P. McCarthy, including
the Bob Steele programmers
The Oklahoma Cyclone (1930),
The Land of Missing Men (1930),
Headin' North (1930),
The Sunrise Trail (1931) and the
Tim McCoy "hoss opera"
The Western Code (1932). After
a supporting role in
Enrico Caruso Jr.'s
La buenaventura (1934), he made
his return to Mexican pictures in 1934, starring in
Heart of a Bandit (1934) and
director
Fernando de Fuentes'
Cruz Diablo (1934).
Fernandez's first film as a director was
La isla de la pasión (1942),
in 1941, which he also wrote and in which he played a bit part. The
movie starred Pedro Armendáriz, who
Fernandez would cast in many of his films. Another favorite
collaborator was his wife
Columba Domínguez. El Indio
rapidly gained a reputation as Mexico's premier director making
populist dramas. His Maria Candelaria (1944)
put Mexican film on the map when it won the Grand Prize at the Cannes
Film Festival in 1946. It has been variously praised as "the
highest triumph of Mexican plastic arts on celluloid" and as "a titanic
promise for strictly patriotic [Mexican] cinema." French film critic
Georges Sadoul, in his 1954 book
"Histoire General du Cinema," praised the film for its "authentic"
portrayal of rural Mexican life and for addressing race relations.
The film remains controversial in Mexico due to El Indio's aesthetic
choices, which emphasized the exotic and primitive, and his
representation of Mexican Indians, which some critics believed was
inauthentic or "touristy." The nationalistic Fernandez wanted to
articulate an idea of what it meant to be Mexican that was uniquely
Mexican, and not influenced by Hollywood, whose films he felt were
Americanizing Mexican cinema audiences. Terming his films "autos
sacramentales [passion plays] of mexicanidad," Fernandez
wanted to create a Mexican cinema that Mexicanized Mexicans. The film
stars Dolores del Rio, the Hollywood movie star who had returned to
Mexico after becoming disillusioned with the American movie industry,
as the daughter of a prostitute trying to survive just before the
Revolution. Set in the floating gardens of Xochimilco in Mexico City,
del Rio's character is shunned by the locals, who are indigenous
people. Her great desire is to marry her lover, played by Pedro
Armendariz, but their romance proves to be star-crossed. Fernandez's
direction was flawless, and Figueroa's black-and-white cinematography
was masterful. The collaborators created one of the classics of not
just Mexican movies but of world cinema. When El Indio and Figueroa
were making "Maria Candelaria," they were part of a movement in which
Mexican filmmakers were consciously attempting to create an indigenous
art cinema that could compete with Hollywood product while
simultaneously articulating a vision of Mexicans that was rooted in the
"indigenismo" and "mestizophilia" of Mexican intellectuals.
José Vasconcelos, the Minister
of Education during the Obregon administration, was particularly
influential due to his concepts of "mexicanos en potencia" and the
cosmic race. In Vasconcelos' philosophy, the "barbarous" Indian was
redeemed by a modernization program based on education, and by the
assimilation of the Indians with the Caucausian Europeans into "la
raza" of mestizos ("mestizaje"). Gabriel Figueroa was conscious of the
fact that he and Fernandez, a creative team that became known as "Epoca
de Oro," invented an idea of rural Mexico that did not actually exist.
Figueroa established himself as the leader in imagining a new,
post-revolutionary Mexican consciousness, through the vehicle of the
visual image. A "painter in light," Figueroa learned his craft from
Gregg Toland and
Eduard Tisse, Eisenstein's cinematographer.
Figueroa is credited with creating the classic Mexican film aesthetic
in collaboration with El Indio and other film directors. In over 200
movies, he developed the classic imagery and aesthetic of Mexican
cinema, which also influenced and was influenced by contemporary
Mexican artists. Figueroa pioneered an indigenous visual vernacular
that affected the muralist movement, and he has been referred to as the
fourth of the most important Mexican muralist after Orozco,
Diego Rivera and
David Siqueiros. Siqueiros himself
called Figueroa's cinematography "murals that travel."
In their 25 films together between 1942-58, El Indio and Figueroa
created the idea of "mexicanidad" cinema while elevating the mestizaje
(mixed-race) identity, as well as the status of the pre-Columbian
culture. The epic visual style they developed was indebted to
Eisenstein's unfinished "Que viva Mexico." Their style fetishized the
Mexican landscape through beautiful, carefully composed, stationary
long shots. For two decades Mexican art cinema was identified with the
films resulting from the Fernandez-Figueroa collaboration. Their films
not only affected Mexican audiences' collective identity, but they
affected how their audiences, both domestic and global, viewed Mexico
and its history.
The climax of "Maria Candelaria" was an homage to
Carlos Navarro's classic
"indigenista" film Janitzio (1935). The
movie is evocative of the anti-clerical struggles engendered by the
Revolution. The secularization of the Mexican state was begun with the
1910 Revolution, continued with the 1917 Constitution, and reached a
violent apotheosis in the Cristero Rebellion of 1926-29, when the
President tried to crack down on the Roman Catholic church. However,
the anti-clericalism of the revolutionaries had to co-exist with the
cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the symbol that has proved the most
powerful and enduring in creating a Mexican national consciousness. Our
Lady has served as a symbol for political struggles from the
19th-century wars of independence to the Cristero wars. On one level,
"Maria Candelaria" is a paean to the cult of the Virgin Mary, a
phenomenon present in much of classical Mexican cinema,
which likely is one of the reasons the films Fernandez and Figueroa and
others of the 1940s and 1950s proved so popular all over Latin America.
In 1946 Fernandez filmed an adaptation of John Steinbeck's novella "The
Pearl," in Spanish- and English-language versions. Shot by Figueroa and
starring El Indio's favorite actor, Pedro Armendariz, "La perla" won El
Indio a nomination for Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, further
solidifying his notoriety as a director and publicizing the
Mexican movie industry. The film also won him the Golden Ariel for Best
Picture at the 1948 Ariel Awards (the Mexican equivalent of the
Oscars), and Fernandez, Figueroa, Armendariz and
Juan García won Silver Ariels for
Best Direction, Cinematography, Actor and Supporting Actor,
respectively. Figueroa won a Golden Globe for Best Cinematography in
1949 from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
In 1948 Salón México (1949) was
released, written and directed by Fernandez with cinematography by
Figueroa. An urban melodrama, the film was groundbreaking in that it
helped usher in a new genre, the "cabaretera" (cabaret) film, racier
and just as commercial as the familiar genre of rancheras, which was
then fading in popularity. The movie recreates the atmosphere of the
famous Mexico City dance hall and won
Marga López an Ariel Award for her role as the taxi dancer Mercedes. The
movie featured a sensual soundtrack performed by the Afro-Cuban music
group Son Clave de Oro. By the end of
the 1940s Emilio Fernandez was the most famous and prestigious
director in all of Latin America. He would continue his reign as
Mexico's premier director into the mid-'50s, when his powers began to
decline and Spanish amigra Luis Buñuel took over the title. As the most
famous directors and biggest stars aged or died, Mexican cinema began
to decline commercially, and the Golden Age of Mexican cinema came to
an end (ironically, Bunuel's Mexican oeuvre strengthened as the
national cinema went into decline and L'age d'or went into eclipse).
Although Fernandez and Figueroa last worked together in
El puño del amo (1958), which
starred El Indio's half-brother
Jaime Fernández, the
collaboration was essentially over by the mid-'50s when they made
La rosa blanca (1954) and
La Tierra del Fuego se apaga (1955).
Their last great film together was
La rebelión de los colgados (1954)
(based on B. Traven's "Rebellion of
the Hanged," it's English-language title), which starred Pedro
Armendariz and Emiolio's half-brother Jaime Fernández, both of whom were nominated for
Silver Ariel awards as Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor,
respectively. Jaime Fernandez won the Ariel, as did
Amanda del Llano for Best Supporting
Actress, Gloria Schoemann for
editing and José B. Carles for sound.
Antonio Díaz Conde was nominated for
a Silver Ariel for Best Score. As his collaboration with Fernandez
waned, Figueroa's professional relationship with Bunuel waxed.
Figueroa first served as director of photography on Bunuel's classic
The Young and the Damned (1950), which won 11
Ariels in 1951, including the Golden Ariel as Best Picture in 1951 and
awards for Best Cinematography for Figueroa and Best Director and
Original Story for Bunuel. Their other films together were
Nazarin (1959) ("This Strange Passion";
winner of the International Prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival),
Fever Mounts at El Pao (1959);
The Young One (1960), (which won a
Special Mention at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival);
The Exterminating Angel (1962),
("The Exterminating Angel"); and
Simon of the Desert (1965)
("Simon of the Desert"). Of the Golden Age output, "New York Times"
movie critic A.O. Scott said, "There is a
frankness in these films that would never have passed muster with the
Hays Office." The Golden Age had peaked in the 1940s, bolstered by the
economic boom caused by the World War II alliance with the US,
government support for the industry via state-funded studios, the
maturation of a star system, and the rationalization of distribution
and exhibition. Aside from Bunuel's pictures, the post-Golden Age era
saw indigenous cinema suffer through the 1960s, as the industry became
more dependent on formulaic pictures and such popular genres as the
"Santo the Wrestler" series. During the 1960s and 1970s many low-grade
horror and action movies were produced with professional wrestler Santo
and Hugo Stiglitz being the biggest stars.
However, the moribund 1960s led to a revival of government support for
the industry in the 1970s, which established the base for a revival of
Mexican art cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. El Indio continued directing
films until 1979, but when his collaboration with Figueroa ended in
1958, his reputation suffered as the artistry of his pictures declined.
He began acting more, though he directed a picture every few years.
Gradually, the notoriety of his life began overtaking his reputation as
a filmmaker. El Indio lived out the fantasy of perhaps every director
when he shot a critic, who had dissed one of his movies, in the
testicles. A violent man, he shot and killed a farm laborer, which he
claimed was in self-defense. Convicted of manslaughter in 1976, he
served six months of a 4-1/2-year sentence. By the 1960s Fernandez's
off-screen reputation as a violent man led to his typecasting as
brutal villains in many Mexican and American films. As an actor,
Fernandez appeared with his brother, singer/actor
Fernando Fernández, in John
Ford's The Fugitive (1947), on which
he also served as associate producer. Other American films he appeared
in were John Huston's
The Unforgiven (1960) (on which he
also served as second unit director) and
The Night of the Iguana (1964),
the John Wayne pictures
The War Wagon (1967) and
Chisum (1970) (on which he also served as
second unit director), Sidney J. Furie's
The Appaloosa (1966) in support of
Marlon Brando, and
Burt Kennedy's
Return of the Seven (1966).
After assaying the role of renegade Mexican Gen. Mapache in the classic "The Wild
Bunch", Fernandez appeared in two other Peckinpah films, as Paco in Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)
and as El
Jefe, who gives the order to Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974).
He was reunited with John Huston in
Under the Volcano (1984) and
appeared in Roman Polanski's
Pirates (1986).
El Indio's last two films as a writer-director were
México Norte (1979) and
Erótica (1979), in which he also starred.
In all, El Indio directed 43 pictures from 1942-79. He was the credited
screenwriter on 40 pictures, starting with
Beautiful Sky (1936) in 1936. He
also served as second-unit director, both credited and uncredited, on
such American pictures shot in Mexico as
The Magnificent Seven (1960),
in which he was attached to the American crew by the Mexican government
to ensure that the depictions of Mexicans were not racist or demeaning.
Fernandez died in Mexico City on 8/6/86.
Government sponsorship of the industry and the creation of
state-supported film helped create the phenomenon known as the "Nuevo
Cine Mexicano" ("New Mexican Cinema") that catapulted Mexican movies
into prominence on the global market in the 1990s.
Amores Perros (2000),
And Your Mother Too (2001) and
The Crime of Padre Amaro (2002)
are just three of the most recent Mexican films that have featured
prominently in American art cinemas. The spirit of El Indio lives on!
In 2002 "La Perla" was named to the National Film Preservation Board's
National Film Registry, which is maintained by the US Library of
Congress. Fernandez and his collaborator Gabriel Figueroa were honored
on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of El Indio's birth at the
inaugural Puerto Vallarta Film Festival of the Americas held in Puerto
Vallarta, Mexico, in November 2004.
of Mexican movies. For an era he symbolized Mexico due to his violent
machismo, rooted in the Revolution of 1910-17, and because of his
staunch commitment to Mexican cultural nationalism. Born to a Mexican (Mestizo) father
and a Native American Kickapoo mother, Emilio was himself the "mestizaje" (mestizo)
that his films would later glorify.
The teenaged Fernandez abandoned his studies to serve as an officer in
the Huertista rebellion, which broke out on 12/4/1923, led by
Gen. Adolfo de la Huerta. On July 20th of that year,
Pancho Villa had been ambushed and
murdered; one theory was that the killing was done by agents of Mexican
President Álvaro Obregón. Obregon, when
he served as a general during the revolution, had defeated Villa in
four successive battles collectively known as the Battle of Celaya,
which was the largest military confrontation in Latin-American history
before the 1982 Falklands War.
Under the Constitution of 1917 that Obregon himself helped write,
Mexican presidents could not succeed themselves (Obregon would later
have the constitution amended so he could serve a second,
non-consecutive term; after winning the presidential election of 1928,
he was assassinated before his inauguration). Obregon had won the
presidency in 1920 after inciting a successful military revolt against
President Venustiano Carranza, who
had planned on naming Ignacio Bonillas as his successor instead of
Obregon, who believed that he deserved it. The revolt began when the
governor of the state of Sonora, Gen. Huerta, broke with President
Carranza and declared the secession of Sonora. This was a signal for
the beginning of the successful uprising against Carranza, led by
Obregon and supported by Gen. Plutarco Elías Calles. After
Carranza was killed in an ambush, Huerta served as provisional
president of Mexico from 6/1/1920 to 12/1/1920, until elections
could be held. When Obregon won the federal election, Huerta became
Minister of Finance in the new government.
Huerta considered himself the natural successor to President Obregon,
just as Obregon had considered himself Carranza's natural successor.
The murdered Villa was seen as an ally of Huerta, who had publicly
announced his candidacy for the presidency. Obregon, however, planned
to remain in power by handpicking his successor, a tradition that
lasted throughout 20th-century Mexican politics. When he named his
anti-clerical Minister of the Interior, the former Gen. Calles, as his
heir, Huerta rose up in a rebellion that eventually affected half of
the Mexican army. Like Huerta a native of Sonora and a former general
in the Mexican army, Calles had preceded him as governor and military
ruler of their home state from 1915-16. Huerta thought his service and
loyalty to Obregon should have brought him the presidency, but Mexican
presidents, not allowed to succeed themselves and limited (mostly) to
one term, tried to extend their power by naming political puppets as
successors (Calles would outdo Obregon by controlling the Mexican
presidency outright or through puppets from 1924-34).
The rebellion was a serious threat to Obregon, but he was able to quash
it by using loyal army units, battalions of workers and farmers and
intervention by the US. By the time the revolt ended in March 1924, 54 generals
and 7,000 soldiers were gone, either killed in battle, executed, exiled
or dismissed. Obregon banished Huerta to exile in the US (where he
lived in Los Angeles, supporting himself as a music teacher). This was
the cauldron of violence and nationalism in which the young Fernandez
came into his manhood. He received a 20-year prison sentence for his
participation in the rebellion on the losing side. Escaping prison by
following Huerta into exile in Los Angeles, Fernandez absorbed the
rudiments of filmmaking as a bit player and extra working in Hollywood
in the 1920s and early 1930s. With the election of
Lázaro Cárdenas as president in 1934,
the Huertista rebels were granted an amnesty (Huerta himself was
recalled from exile by Cardenas in 1935 and served in several posts,
including Inspector General of Foreign Consulates and Director General
of Civil Pensions). Fernandez returned to Mexico in 1934 and began
working in the Mexican movie industry as a screenwriter and actor. His
Indian looks, which gave him his nickname "El Indio," also brought him
his first lead role, playing an Indian in
Janitzio (1935). Due to his imposing
physical presence and Indian countenance, El Indio was cast as bandits,
charros (cowboys) and revolutionaries.
The Cardenas government of 1934-40 established the framework in which
the "Golden Age of Mexican Cinema" could be realized. The political
system that dominated Mexico for over half a century was consolidated
during his regime. The government incorporated trade unions, campesino
(peasant) organizations and middle-class professionals and office
workers into the ruling Party of the Mexican Revolution (later the
Party of the Institutional Revolution, or PRI). Cardenas oversaw the
redistribution of millions of acres of land to peasants and the
expansion of collective bargaining rights and wage increases to
workers.
Cardenas and all subsequent PRM/PRI presidents (all presidents of
Mexico in the 20th century beginning with Calles were PRM/PRI members;
Vicente Fox was the first from outside the
party in three-quarters of a century) maintained political control of
Mexico by granting favors and concessions to their constituencies
inside the corporatist party structure in exchange for worker and
campesino organizations delivering votes and suppressing discontent
among their constituencies. The PRM/PRI itself created an
organizational structure for the government that allowed citizens
access to the political realm, in the sense that they could interface
with government agencies. Once inside the government machine, seeking
redress, favors, etc., the non-connected citizen was led through a maze
of layers of bureaucracy that never permitted a satisfactory result.
Citizens caught in the maze were eventually frustrated and discouraged,
but the ingenious if disingenuous system worked as it gave them
input--just no guaranteed output. By frustrating them within an
institutional structure, the PRM/PRI governments--both federal and
state--took the fight out of them. The PRM/PRI sought to control
frustration that had led to violence in the past, particularly among
the generals who had the power to destabilize the society and economy.
That government structure thus served as a homeostatic device for the
people's frustration, relieving it and never allowing it to build up
again into a revolutionary situation.
Cardenas' most notable achievement arguably was the nationalization of
Mexico's oil industry. After unsuccessfully trying to negotiate better
terms with Mexican Eagle--the holding company owned by Royal
Dutch/Shell and Standard Oil of New Jersey--Cardenas nationalized
Mexico's petroleum reserves and expropriated the equipment of the
foreign oil companies on 3/18/38. A spontaneous six-hour parade
broke out in Mexico City to celebrate the event. Unlike
Fidel Castro's nationalization of
foreign assets in Cuba, Shell and SONJ were compensated for their
expropriated assets. Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) and the Mexican model
became a beacon for other oil-producing nations seeking to gain control
over their own energy resources from foreign companies. Cardenas
was the only PRM/PRI president who did not enrich himself while in office. After
retiring as Minister of Defense in 1945--the post he took after
relinquishing the presidency--he assumed a modest lifestyle. He spent
the last years of his life supervising irrigation projects and
promoting education and free medical care for the poor. This was the
man who set the tone of the modern Mexico that arose from the
revolution and civil wars of the 1920s, who cleared the ground for the
economic boom of the 1940s in which the "Golden Age of Mexican
Cinema" reached its apogee. Classic Mexican cinema has mostly been
ignored in the US due to the language barrier and a colonialist mindset
suffused with racism. When Mexican cinema has been addressed by
those north of the border, the primary focus fell on the brilliant
cinematography of
Gabriel Figueroa, who shot
films for John Ford and
John Huston, or on former Hollywood
star Dolores Del Río. Fernandez's
reputation was so great that he was even appreciated in the US in his
lifetime, but his notoriety as a sort of wildman of the Mexican movie
industry and his appearance as an actor in
Sam Peckinpah's
The Wild Bunch (1969) overshadowed
his greatness as a director. While Mexico has often served as a locale
for American films--the genres of sweet (white) young things imperiled
by swarthy Mexican bandits and of Americans in revolutionary Mexico, to say
nothing of Zorro and The Cisco Kid--have been part of the Yankee cinema
since the East Coast-based film companies began relocating to southern
California in the early 1910s. Gringo
Warner Baxter won the second Oscar ever
awarded for Best Actor playing The Cisco Kid in a role originally
intended for Raoul Walsh, of all people.
Mexico has been the site of such blockbuster films as
Viva Villa! (1934),
Juarez (1939),
Viva Zapata! (1952),
Vera Cruz (1954),
The Professionals (1966) and
"The Wild Bunch," but except for
La caza del oro (1972), a
Johnny-Come-Lately to the genre, they seldom featured Mexican actors in
anything other than bit parts, if at all, with the exception of
Anthony Quinn, one of the few
Mexican-Americans to achieve superstar status. Mexican performers taken
up by Hollywood --such as
Ramon Novarro,
Rita Hayworth,
John Gavin and
Raquel Welch--were, like half-Mexican
baseball great Ted Williams (born
in San Diego), de-ethnicized in a sort of cultural ethnic cleansing.
Salma Hayek, who is of mixed Mexican and
Lebanese parentage, is arguably the first Mexican since
Lupe Velez and Dolores del Rio to cross over
as a Hollywood superstar and remain identifiably Mexican (even at the
dawn of a new millennium, she was urged by her Hollywood agents to play
up her Arabic ethnicity, even with anti-Arab feeling rife in Hollywood
and the US at large--their "reasoning" was that no one would go see a
Mexican in movies since their cleaning ladies were Mexican),
Until the 1990s, with
Like Water for Chocolate (1992)
("Like Water for Chocolate"), Mexican films themselves seldom strayed
in the Yankee consciousness, except for the rare one like
The Pearl (1947), based on a novel by
Californian John Steinbeck and a
prize-winner at the Venice Film Festival. "La Perla" was directed by
Fernandez, the greatest director to come out of Mexico's golden age of
cinema. The first Mexican feature was released in 1906, though
production often was eclipsed by political and economic conditions.
There were documentaries made about the Mexican Revolution in the
1910s, but very few films were made in the 1920s.
Sergei Eisenstein's trip to
Mexico in the early 1930s to make
Que Viva Mexico (1979),
which remained unfinished due to his problems with his American backer,
Upton Sinclair, injected a new enthusiasm
into the Mexican movie industry.
While most American film historians place the Golden Age firmly in the
1940s--some specifically assigning it to the period 1943-46 and others
extending it until the mid-'50s--the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema
properly stretches back to 1936, peaks in the mid-'40s (when the
Mexican cinema receives international recognition; two of
Fernandez's films won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and
were nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festivals) and
terminates in the
mid-'50s, with the
end of Fernandez's 25-film collaboration with cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. Figueroa, the Mexican movie industry's first great director, inaugurated the
Golden Age in 1936 with two hits,
Out on the Big Ranch (1936)
("Out at Big Ranch") and
Let's Go with Pancho Villa (1936)
("Let's Go with Pancho Villa"). Both were "political message" movies
addressing the social and cultural issues lying at the heart of Mexican
Revolution. "Vamonos con Pancho Villa" has the distinction of being the
first feature produced at the Mexican government-subsidized studio
Cinematografica Latino Americana S.A., while "Allá en el Rancho Grande"
made Tito Guízar a star. Guizar eventually
became the Mexican movie industry's first superstar by playing in the
"comedias rancheras" (ranch comedies) genre that was the most popular
type of film in Mexico in the 1930s. A hit with audiences throughout
Latin America, "comedias rancheras" were set in an idyllic,
pre-revolutionary Mexico. The vaudevillian Mario Moreno, who became a
Latin-American superstar under the name
Cantinflas, made his short-subject debut in
1936 and would soon become the Latin-American film industry's leading
comedian when he made his feature-film debut in
You're Missing the Point (1940)
("There is the Detail"). The Cantinflas character is rooted in the
image of the "pelado," or poor white trash, and his character deflates
respectable society through his sharp repartee. Peace--i.e., a lack of
overt domestic political turmoil--laid the groundwork for the
development of a truly popular indigenous cinema in the 1930s and '40s. The comedias rancheras and Cantinflas comedies helped make the
Mexican cinema commercially viable. With Hollywood distracted by
turning out propaganda and military training films during World War II,
there was an opening in Latin America that the Mexican industry filled.
Without competition from Hollywood, the Mexican movie industry
dominated Latin-American cinemas for most of the decade. Movie
production tripled in the 1940s compared to the previous decade. The
Mexican film industry underwent a consolidation and developed a star
system, some of whom crossed over to achieve international recognition.
The peak of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema came in the 1940s, spurred
by rapid industrialization and a resulting affluence--although inequitably
distributed--caused by trade with the US, as World War II boosted
American demand for Mexican raw materials. The Mexican movie industry
became the world's largest producer of Spanish-language films, helped
by the fact that the other large producers, Argentina and Spain, were
headed by fascist governments. Though the Mexican government was
conservative and repressive in the 1940s, it encouraged the production
of nationalist films that helped articulate a Mexican identity.
During the 1940s Mexican movie stars and directors became popular
icons, and some even became public figures with effective political
influence. Among the movie stars blossoming during the decade were
Dolores del Rio, Pedro Infante,
Jorge Negrete,
Joaquín Pardavé and
María Félix, while Fernandez and Figueroa
became globally known. Luis Buñuel moved to
Mexico and would direct some of the country's major movies in the
following decade.
Mexican movies typically were genre pictures, melodramas, romances,
musicals, comedies and horror, which addressed all aspects of Mexican
society, from love stories about the "lumpen proletariat" to dramas
about the Indians. Mexican movies are a mirror of Mexican society,
including history (19th-century dictator
Porfirio Díaz and his court, The
Revolution and Villa and
Emiliano Zapata), obsessions
(both familial and erotic) and mythology (Indian and big-city culture).
Mexican cinema did this using the classic genres of the the melodrama,
the comedy (in its romantic, musical and ranchera versions, and
slapstick and farce) and even the horror film. With its proximity to
Hollywood, and the fact that many leading lights of the Mexican cinema
were familiar with Hollywood production values, the indigenous movie
industry set a high standard for itself, as it had to measure up to
Hollywood product.
Fernandez made his motion picture debut as an actor in
Chano Urueta's
El destino (1928), but his early work
in movies was in American westerns churned out by Monogram director
John P. McCarthy, including
the Bob Steele programmers
The Oklahoma Cyclone (1930),
The Land of Missing Men (1930),
Headin' North (1930),
The Sunrise Trail (1931) and the
Tim McCoy "hoss opera"
The Western Code (1932). After
a supporting role in
Enrico Caruso Jr.'s
La buenaventura (1934), he made
his return to Mexican pictures in 1934, starring in
Heart of a Bandit (1934) and
director
Fernando de Fuentes'
Cruz Diablo (1934).
Fernandez's first film as a director was
La isla de la pasión (1942),
in 1941, which he also wrote and in which he played a bit part. The
movie starred Pedro Armendáriz, who
Fernandez would cast in many of his films. Another favorite
collaborator was his wife
Columba Domínguez. El Indio
rapidly gained a reputation as Mexico's premier director making
populist dramas. His Maria Candelaria (1944)
put Mexican film on the map when it won the Grand Prize at the Cannes
Film Festival in 1946. It has been variously praised as "the
highest triumph of Mexican plastic arts on celluloid" and as "a titanic
promise for strictly patriotic [Mexican] cinema." French film critic
Georges Sadoul, in his 1954 book
"Histoire General du Cinema," praised the film for its "authentic"
portrayal of rural Mexican life and for addressing race relations.
The film remains controversial in Mexico due to El Indio's aesthetic
choices, which emphasized the exotic and primitive, and his
representation of Mexican Indians, which some critics believed was
inauthentic or "touristy." The nationalistic Fernandez wanted to
articulate an idea of what it meant to be Mexican that was uniquely
Mexican, and not influenced by Hollywood, whose films he felt were
Americanizing Mexican cinema audiences. Terming his films "autos
sacramentales [passion plays] of mexicanidad," Fernandez
wanted to create a Mexican cinema that Mexicanized Mexicans. The film
stars Dolores del Rio, the Hollywood movie star who had returned to
Mexico after becoming disillusioned with the American movie industry,
as the daughter of a prostitute trying to survive just before the
Revolution. Set in the floating gardens of Xochimilco in Mexico City,
del Rio's character is shunned by the locals, who are indigenous
people. Her great desire is to marry her lover, played by Pedro
Armendariz, but their romance proves to be star-crossed. Fernandez's
direction was flawless, and Figueroa's black-and-white cinematography
was masterful. The collaborators created one of the classics of not
just Mexican movies but of world cinema. When El Indio and Figueroa
were making "Maria Candelaria," they were part of a movement in which
Mexican filmmakers were consciously attempting to create an indigenous
art cinema that could compete with Hollywood product while
simultaneously articulating a vision of Mexicans that was rooted in the
"indigenismo" and "mestizophilia" of Mexican intellectuals.
José Vasconcelos, the Minister
of Education during the Obregon administration, was particularly
influential due to his concepts of "mexicanos en potencia" and the
cosmic race. In Vasconcelos' philosophy, the "barbarous" Indian was
redeemed by a modernization program based on education, and by the
assimilation of the Indians with the Caucausian Europeans into "la
raza" of mestizos ("mestizaje"). Gabriel Figueroa was conscious of the
fact that he and Fernandez, a creative team that became known as "Epoca
de Oro," invented an idea of rural Mexico that did not actually exist.
Figueroa established himself as the leader in imagining a new,
post-revolutionary Mexican consciousness, through the vehicle of the
visual image. A "painter in light," Figueroa learned his craft from
Gregg Toland and
Eduard Tisse, Eisenstein's cinematographer.
Figueroa is credited with creating the classic Mexican film aesthetic
in collaboration with El Indio and other film directors. In over 200
movies, he developed the classic imagery and aesthetic of Mexican
cinema, which also influenced and was influenced by contemporary
Mexican artists. Figueroa pioneered an indigenous visual vernacular
that affected the muralist movement, and he has been referred to as the
fourth of the most important Mexican muralist after Orozco,
Diego Rivera and
David Siqueiros. Siqueiros himself
called Figueroa's cinematography "murals that travel."
In their 25 films together between 1942-58, El Indio and Figueroa
created the idea of "mexicanidad" cinema while elevating the mestizaje
(mixed-race) identity, as well as the status of the pre-Columbian
culture. The epic visual style they developed was indebted to
Eisenstein's unfinished "Que viva Mexico." Their style fetishized the
Mexican landscape through beautiful, carefully composed, stationary
long shots. For two decades Mexican art cinema was identified with the
films resulting from the Fernandez-Figueroa collaboration. Their films
not only affected Mexican audiences' collective identity, but they
affected how their audiences, both domestic and global, viewed Mexico
and its history.
The climax of "Maria Candelaria" was an homage to
Carlos Navarro's classic
"indigenista" film Janitzio (1935). The
movie is evocative of the anti-clerical struggles engendered by the
Revolution. The secularization of the Mexican state was begun with the
1910 Revolution, continued with the 1917 Constitution, and reached a
violent apotheosis in the Cristero Rebellion of 1926-29, when the
President tried to crack down on the Roman Catholic church. However,
the anti-clericalism of the revolutionaries had to co-exist with the
cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the symbol that has proved the most
powerful and enduring in creating a Mexican national consciousness. Our
Lady has served as a symbol for political struggles from the
19th-century wars of independence to the Cristero wars. On one level,
"Maria Candelaria" is a paean to the cult of the Virgin Mary, a
phenomenon present in much of classical Mexican cinema,
which likely is one of the reasons the films Fernandez and Figueroa and
others of the 1940s and 1950s proved so popular all over Latin America.
In 1946 Fernandez filmed an adaptation of John Steinbeck's novella "The
Pearl," in Spanish- and English-language versions. Shot by Figueroa and
starring El Indio's favorite actor, Pedro Armendariz, "La perla" won El
Indio a nomination for Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, further
solidifying his notoriety as a director and publicizing the
Mexican movie industry. The film also won him the Golden Ariel for Best
Picture at the 1948 Ariel Awards (the Mexican equivalent of the
Oscars), and Fernandez, Figueroa, Armendariz and
Juan García won Silver Ariels for
Best Direction, Cinematography, Actor and Supporting Actor,
respectively. Figueroa won a Golden Globe for Best Cinematography in
1949 from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
In 1948 Salón México (1949) was
released, written and directed by Fernandez with cinematography by
Figueroa. An urban melodrama, the film was groundbreaking in that it
helped usher in a new genre, the "cabaretera" (cabaret) film, racier
and just as commercial as the familiar genre of rancheras, which was
then fading in popularity. The movie recreates the atmosphere of the
famous Mexico City dance hall and won
Marga López an Ariel Award for her role as the taxi dancer Mercedes. The
movie featured a sensual soundtrack performed by the Afro-Cuban music
group Son Clave de Oro. By the end of
the 1940s Emilio Fernandez was the most famous and prestigious
director in all of Latin America. He would continue his reign as
Mexico's premier director into the mid-'50s, when his powers began to
decline and Spanish amigra Luis Buñuel took over the title. As the most
famous directors and biggest stars aged or died, Mexican cinema began
to decline commercially, and the Golden Age of Mexican cinema came to
an end (ironically, Bunuel's Mexican oeuvre strengthened as the
national cinema went into decline and L'age d'or went into eclipse).
Although Fernandez and Figueroa last worked together in
El puño del amo (1958), which
starred El Indio's half-brother
Jaime Fernández, the
collaboration was essentially over by the mid-'50s when they made
La rosa blanca (1954) and
La Tierra del Fuego se apaga (1955).
Their last great film together was
La rebelión de los colgados (1954)
(based on B. Traven's "Rebellion of
the Hanged," it's English-language title), which starred Pedro
Armendariz and Emiolio's half-brother Jaime Fernández, both of whom were nominated for
Silver Ariel awards as Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor,
respectively. Jaime Fernandez won the Ariel, as did
Amanda del Llano for Best Supporting
Actress, Gloria Schoemann for
editing and José B. Carles for sound.
Antonio Díaz Conde was nominated for
a Silver Ariel for Best Score. As his collaboration with Fernandez
waned, Figueroa's professional relationship with Bunuel waxed.
Figueroa first served as director of photography on Bunuel's classic
The Young and the Damned (1950), which won 11
Ariels in 1951, including the Golden Ariel as Best Picture in 1951 and
awards for Best Cinematography for Figueroa and Best Director and
Original Story for Bunuel. Their other films together were
Nazarin (1959) ("This Strange Passion";
winner of the International Prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival),
Fever Mounts at El Pao (1959);
The Young One (1960), (which won a
Special Mention at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival);
The Exterminating Angel (1962),
("The Exterminating Angel"); and
Simon of the Desert (1965)
("Simon of the Desert"). Of the Golden Age output, "New York Times"
movie critic A.O. Scott said, "There is a
frankness in these films that would never have passed muster with the
Hays Office." The Golden Age had peaked in the 1940s, bolstered by the
economic boom caused by the World War II alliance with the US,
government support for the industry via state-funded studios, the
maturation of a star system, and the rationalization of distribution
and exhibition. Aside from Bunuel's pictures, the post-Golden Age era
saw indigenous cinema suffer through the 1960s, as the industry became
more dependent on formulaic pictures and such popular genres as the
"Santo the Wrestler" series. During the 1960s and 1970s many low-grade
horror and action movies were produced with professional wrestler Santo
and Hugo Stiglitz being the biggest stars.
However, the moribund 1960s led to a revival of government support for
the industry in the 1970s, which established the base for a revival of
Mexican art cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. El Indio continued directing
films until 1979, but when his collaboration with Figueroa ended in
1958, his reputation suffered as the artistry of his pictures declined.
He began acting more, though he directed a picture every few years.
Gradually, the notoriety of his life began overtaking his reputation as
a filmmaker. El Indio lived out the fantasy of perhaps every director
when he shot a critic, who had dissed one of his movies, in the
testicles. A violent man, he shot and killed a farm laborer, which he
claimed was in self-defense. Convicted of manslaughter in 1976, he
served six months of a 4-1/2-year sentence. By the 1960s Fernandez's
off-screen reputation as a violent man led to his typecasting as
brutal villains in many Mexican and American films. As an actor,
Fernandez appeared with his brother, singer/actor
Fernando Fernández, in John
Ford's The Fugitive (1947), on which
he also served as associate producer. Other American films he appeared
in were John Huston's
The Unforgiven (1960) (on which he
also served as second unit director) and
The Night of the Iguana (1964),
the John Wayne pictures
The War Wagon (1967) and
Chisum (1970) (on which he also served as
second unit director), Sidney J. Furie's
The Appaloosa (1966) in support of
Marlon Brando, and
Burt Kennedy's
Return of the Seven (1966).
After assaying the role of renegade Mexican Gen. Mapache in the classic "The Wild
Bunch", Fernandez appeared in two other Peckinpah films, as Paco in Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)
and as El
Jefe, who gives the order to Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974).
He was reunited with John Huston in
Under the Volcano (1984) and
appeared in Roman Polanski's
Pirates (1986).
El Indio's last two films as a writer-director were
México Norte (1979) and
Erótica (1979), in which he also starred.
In all, El Indio directed 43 pictures from 1942-79. He was the credited
screenwriter on 40 pictures, starting with
Beautiful Sky (1936) in 1936. He
also served as second-unit director, both credited and uncredited, on
such American pictures shot in Mexico as
The Magnificent Seven (1960),
in which he was attached to the American crew by the Mexican government
to ensure that the depictions of Mexicans were not racist or demeaning.
Fernandez died in Mexico City on 8/6/86.
Government sponsorship of the industry and the creation of
state-supported film helped create the phenomenon known as the "Nuevo
Cine Mexicano" ("New Mexican Cinema") that catapulted Mexican movies
into prominence on the global market in the 1990s.
Amores Perros (2000),
And Your Mother Too (2001) and
The Crime of Padre Amaro (2002)
are just three of the most recent Mexican films that have featured
prominently in American art cinemas. The spirit of El Indio lives on!
In 2002 "La Perla" was named to the National Film Preservation Board's
National Film Registry, which is maintained by the US Library of
Congress. Fernandez and his collaborator Gabriel Figueroa were honored
on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of El Indio's birth at the
inaugural Puerto Vallarta Film Festival of the Americas held in Puerto
Vallarta, Mexico, in November 2004.