Hall, Linda B.: Dolores del Rio: Beauty in Light and Shade (2014)

Hall, Linda B. Dolores del Rio: Beauty in Light and Shade. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012. xi + 358 pp., bibl. ISBN 9780-8047-8407-8. Hall's excellent example of historical biography reminds one of the exceptional pleasures associated with reading about the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. While the parallel Golden Ages of cinema in Argentina and Brazil are equally entertaining and intriguing, with perhaps in Argentina a somewhat more sophisticated level of actual filmmaking, the world of the Mexican Golden Age is not to be matched anywhere else in Latin America. This is due in large measure to the enormous involvement of the Mexican government in promoting film as a heavily ideologized vehicle of a specific postrevolutionary discourse about Mexico (the great cultural critic Carlos Monsivais maintains that Mexicans learned to be Mexicans in throughout the twentieth century by going to the movies); by the high technical quality of productions, thanks to American investments; to very calculated distribution programs; and by the heavy involvement of sectors of the Mexican industry with neighby Hollywood. Dolores del Rio exemplifies well this panorama. Her exceptional beauty and her ability to effectively enact cultural crossovers allowed her the excepcional range of professinal opportunities that made her so ubiquitous during her heyday. She was just exotic enough to make it in Hollywood, where there was room for just the right degree of foreignness, but not too much. Something like the female Rudloph Valentino, she could play any role that required an alternative to the restrained American pale stereotype, and her success is only thrown into relief by the way in which her serious roles were parodied by her contemporary, the Brazlian Carmen Miranda, who was also the Latin American Everywoman, but enacted in over-the-top fashion. And, concomitantly, Del Rio was fair enough to be an exotic presence in Mexican films, perhaps no more so than in her great leading role in Maria Candelaria, where she is almost ethereal, extraterrestrial in the heavy ideologized Mexican space she is plopped down in. Hall is an exceptionally skillful historian. She engages ina fairly straightforward form of historical biography, following her subject chronologically and tracing in clear and appropriately documented order the development of her personal life and her complex professional evolution. Mexican filmmaking of the period aims for a dense reality effect in the attempt to provide an overly determined interpretation of certain primes of Mexican life of interest to the industry and its government backers, all with the attempt to promote, in calculatedly affective ways, particular sentiments, reactions, convictions, and and (assumedly) behaviors on the part of national audiences. This was no more true than in the case of sexual roles, the feo, fuerte y formal formula for men, the chaste, demur, and ennobling formula for women. This was only the more obvious when audiences saw the consequences for the characters played by Maria Felix, for example, for violating the assigned profile for women: there was the frisson of Dona Barbara wielding the whip, but it was inevitable in the end that she be devoured by the violent, pre-civilized (i.e., pre-Revolutonary) nature she had merely been allegorizing. …