page_title: Luis Buñuel
section_title: Mexico (1946–1953)
hierarchical_section_title: Luis Buñuel / Career / Intermediate years (1946–1961) / Mexico (1946–1953)
caption_attribution_description: Retrato de Libertad Lamarque
context_page_description: Luis Buñuel Portolés was a Spanish-Mexican filmmaker, who worked in France, Mexico, and Spain.
  When Buñuel died at age 83, his obituary in The New York Times called him "an iconoclast, moralist, and revolutionary who was a leader of avant-garde surrealism in his youth and a dominant international movie director half a century later". His first picture, Un Chien Andalou—made in the silent era—is still viewed regularly throughout the world and retains its power to shock the viewer, and his last film, That Obscure Object of Desire—made 48 years later—won him Best Director awards from the National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics. Writer Octavio Paz called Buñuel's work "the marriage of the film image to the poetic image, creating a new reality...scandalous and subversive".
  Often associated with the surrealist movement of the 1920s, Buñuel created films from the 1920s through the 1970s. Having worked in Europe and North America, and in French and Spanish, Buñuel's films also spanned various genres.
context_section_description: In 1946, an old friend, producer Denise Tual, the widow of Pierre Batcheff,  the leading man in Un Chien Andalou, proposed that she and Buñuel adapt Lorca's play La casa de Bernarda Alba for production in Paris.  As it turned out, though, before they could both make their way to Europe, they encountered problems in securing the rights from Lorca's family.  While in Mexico City, on a stopover, they had asked Óscar Dancigers, a Russian émigré producer active in Mexico, for financing.  Dancigers ran an independent production company that specialized in assisting U.S. film studios with on-location shooting in Mexico, but following World War II, he had lost his connection with Hollywood due to his being blacklisted as a Communist.  Although Dancigers wasn't enthusiastic about the Lorca project, he did want to work with Buñuel and persuaded the Spanish director to undertake a totally different project.
  The  Golden Age of Mexican cinema was peaking in the mid-to-late 1940s, at just the time Buñuel was connecting with Dancigers.  Movies represented Mexico's third largest industry by 1947, employing 32,000 workers, with 72 film producers who invested 66 million pesos (approximately U.S. $13 million) per year, four active studios with 40 million pesos of invested capital, and approximately 1,500 theaters throughout the nation, with about 200 in Mexico City alone.  For their first project, the two men selected what seemed like a sure-fire success, Gran Casino, a musical period piece set in Tampico during the boom years of oil exploitation, starring two of the most popular entertainers in Latin America: Libertad Lamarque, an Argentine actress and singer, and Jorge Negrete, a Mexican singer and leading man in "charro" films, a Mexican equivalent to the American western. Buñuel recalled:  "I kept them singing all the time—a competition, a championship".
  The film was not successful at the box office, with some even calling it a fiasco. Different reasons have been given for its failure with the public; for some, Buñuel was forced to make concessions to the bad taste of his stars, particularly Negrete, others cite Buñuel's rusty technical skills  and lack of confidence after so many years out of the director's chair, while still others speculate that Mexican audiences were tiring of genre movies, called "churros", that were perceived as being cheaply and hastily made.
  The failure of Gran Casino sidelined Buñuel, and it was over two years before he had the chance to direct another picture.  According to Buñuel, he spent this time "scratching my nose, watching flies and living off my mother's money", but he was actually somewhat more industrious than that may sound.  With the husband/wife team of Janet and Luis Alcoriza, he wrote the scenario for Si usted no puede, yo sí, which was filmed in 1950 by Julián Soler. He also continued developing the idea for a surrealistic film called Ilegible, hijo de flauta, with the poet Juan Larrea. Dancigers pointed out to him that there was currently public interest in films about street urchins, so Buñuel scoured the back streets and slums of Mexico City in search of material, interviewing social workers about street gang warfare and murdered children.
  During this period, Dancigers was busy producing films for the actor/director Fernando Soler, one of the most durable of Mexican film personalities, having been referred to as the "national paterfamilias".   Although Soler typically preferred to direct his own films, for their next collaboration, El Gran Calavera, based on a play by Adolfo Torrado, he decided that doing both jobs would be too much trouble, so he asked Dancigers to find someone who could be trusted to handle the technical aspects of the directorial duties.  Buñuel welcomed the opportunity, stating that: "I amused myself with the montage, the constructions, the angles... All of that interested me because I was still an apprentice in so-called 'normal' cinema."  As a result of his work on this film, he developed a technique for making films cheaply and quickly by limiting them to 125 shots. 
caption: Libertad Lamarque, star of Buñuel's first Mexican film. Buñuel was said to have held a long-time grudge against Lamarque because the actress was able to bring him to tears when he viewed a "corny melodrama" which she had made in Argentina: "How could I let myself cry over such an absurd, grotesque, ridiculous scene?"[120]:p.147
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