Aventurera (The Adventuress) 1950 Mexico (101
minutes) directed by Alberto Gout.
It’s not hard to imagine that there
was way too much passion and sexual melodrama in this film to have made it far
in the American mainstream of its day.
Elena Tejera (Ninón Sevilla), the
‘adventuress’ of the title, is a talented singer and dancer with great body and
a dancer’s legs. She lives by her wits, shakes her booty, and clearly has a lot
of fun doing both.
This fun Mexican film noir features
great character actors, classic Latin American musical numbers and terrific dancing
in a passionate and sexy melodrama lead by two strong and beautiful female
antagonists. It comes a lot closer to showing what Hollywood censorship at the
time would allow American filmmakers only to hint at, and does so in a
refreshingly straightforward way.
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| Elena (Ninon Sevilla) and Rosaura (Andrea Palma) play for keeps in Aventurera 1950 |
Elena, a young Mexican woman living
at home with her well-to-do parents in Chihuahua, finds herself ‘alone in the
world’ after her middle-aged mother, whom she catches making out behind a
closed door with a younger lover, runs off with the lover. This event causes her
disconsolate father to shoot himself in his study.
Elena resolves to make it on her
own in Ciudad Juarez. She has difficulty holding down secretarial jobs because
male employers can’t keep their hands off her, shown in a quick and amusing
succession of campy vignettes.
Lucio Saenz (Tito Junco), an older
acquaintance briefly seen earlier in the film, whose smooth talk, fancy clothes
and gigolo barbering mark him for trouble, gets Elena a ‘night interview’ for a
‘secretarial job’ with Rosaura de Cervera (Andrea Palma). Rosaura looks like an
earthier, film noir version of Kristen Scott-Thomas. She turns out to be the
madam of a fancy Juarez brothel with a club that features nightly floor shows. Saenz
turns out to be one of her ‘talent’ scouts.
At the end of the ‘job interview,’
Rosaura slips a date-rape mickey in Elena’s tea which knocks her out. She sends
a customer up for a ‘date’ with a [sleeping] virgin, and then pays Saenz his
finder’s fee for bringing in Elena, whom she plans to put to work.
Elena objects when she awakes to
this grim prospect, but she appreciates that Rosaura and her enforcers have the
upper hand for the moment. But Elena clearly has ideas of her own. She sings,
dances, and sashays her way through the rest of the film getting even for these
indignities.
What we see of Elena’s work mainly involves
performing in sumptuous sets fantastically oversized for the cabaret-boite
setting, beautifully choreographed, lit and shot.
Her numbers include some of the
best known Latin American mambo and samba bands and musical performers of the
time: Pedro Vargas, Ana María González, Los Angeles del Infierno (not the later
Spanish heavy metalistas), Perez Prado and his Orchestra, Trio Los Panchos, Ray
Montoya and his Orchestra and Tona La Negra.
The rest of the story needs to be
seen to be believed—and enjoyed. This picture has every bit as much the dramatic
studio lighting and photography, snappy dialog (in Spanish, with English
subtitles), and wildly improbable but entertaining plot twists as classic
American movies of the same era.
One of only things that separates
it from the great American icons of that period is the very end which, unlike
the preceding hour and a half of sharp and dramatic interior and exterior
scenes, gets lost in the night fog of Juarez, probably the result of a degraded
print. Good as this film is, it would be as close as movies of this era came to
perfect with a Casablanca-like resolution as sharp as the rest of the picture.
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