EDITION 89

JULY 2008

Cantinflas
“The detail lies here”

By Joaquin Lopez
Chronicler of Teacapan, Sinaloa

For my Teacher Herberto Sinagawa Montoya
The Saturday and Sunday editions for March 11 and 12, 1939 of El Democrata newspaper announced that Cantinflas, along with his troupe, would appear in Mazatlan´s Teatro Royal on Angel Flores Street (the same theater that after remodeling became the Diana Cinema towards the end of last century). The mime's visit to the port would just be another curious anecdote of a celebrity who came through town or a mere opportunity to unveil another plaque. We found that 1939 was the year of the establishment of Cantinflas as Mexico's foremost comedian. His appearance here demonstrates that Mazatlan was an important showcase.

According to a personal interview by Guadalupe Elizalde, Cantinflas and Mario Moreno Reyes were born "on the sixth street of Santa Maria la Redonda # 182 at 12:30 in the morning of Saturday, August 12th, 1911".

Although he was poor, he never knew abject poverty, but the salary that his father, Pedro Moreno Esquivel earned, was not enough to maintain his 14 children, 8 of which survived. Various articles on the internet assure us that he studied medicine, but Cantinflas said that it was an agronomy school that he dropped out of. In addition, "I fled from my house and became a soldier, but this adventure didn't last long since my father came to look for me in Chihuahua after pleadings from my mother, Soledad Reyes Guizar... and I was discharged for being underage."

Since he didn't want to study or work and his father had demanded that he help out keeping the home together, he once again left the shelter of his family and dedicated himself to boxing in the company of his brother Pepe; beforehand, they would agree on who would fall in order to collect the 7 pesos for the winner. Cantinflas spent some time as a boxer in Jalapa in 1928 and 1929 and when he returned to Mexico City he struck up a relationship with the Aragon family who were the owners of Teatro Ofelia, a place where he said "my artistic baptism came as Polito". It was Cuernavaca where he began to create his famous character, Cantinflas. From there on, he would work in many other carpas (popular circus tents used for political comedy) until he drifted into one called "Valentina", in Tacuba. There he sealed his destiny through a friendship with Estanislao Schilinski and Valentina Zubareff. Estanislao became his comedian partner who wrote the script for his first short film, while Valentina his spouse for life.

In an interview with Jacobo Zabludowski (a well known TV anchorman), Cantinflas revealed that his mother, Doña Chole, came from Cotija de la Paz, Michoacan, and that his success as a comedian in the carpas had led him to the Follies Bergere theater in Mexico City. All this happened during the presidential term of another person from Michoacan, General Lazaro Cardenas del Rio.

Miguel Angel Morales wrote that Cantinflas in his first movie, "Asi Es Mi Tierra" (1936) shared credits with the comedian Jose Medel, but something happened that would place Moreno Reyes way above Medel.

"...On Wednesday, July 28th, 1938, the obese Luis N. Morones, age 47, returned to the country after having been expelled by Cardenas in April, along with former president Plutarco Elias Calles and formed an accusation against his fellow workers at the CROM convention." In the closing ceremony, Morones challenged the powerful Vincente Lombardo Toledano, (previously his protégée and by that time the head of the Mexican Workers Union or CTM) to a public debate. Lombardo Toledano answered him via the newspaper El Universal "If this is an oratory contest, I think that a man's best speech is his own life and the life of Morones has already been judged. If Morones is proposing to show his dialectic ability, let him debate with Cantinflas." According to Alfonso Taracena, "with the stroke of a pen, Lombardo put the comedian in the hall of fame."

Cantinflas defined the carpas as a kind of "resonance box where actors used to express what regular folk thought. Contrary to what one may believe, Mexico is a very critical society and nothing that happens or is mandated from the upper echelons of power can go unnoticed. If someone goes to a café or a gathering of friends, the recurring theme is politics. In those years when Mexico was more manageable in size and dimension, those commentaries spread with an impressive speed. The public was very well informed and the politicians spoke as clearly as I do. Us actors, we latched onto the popular sentiment, we made it ours and we stamped it with our personal style."

It is not adventurous to say that Cantinflas and other comedians of the era served as an escape valve when they voiced their disagreements with the government by expressing national feelings in theater and cinema. It is well known that president Cardenas was an extremely serious person, however as Cantinflas said, there were no acts of censorship imposed by the authorities when they directly made fun of politicians. In contrast, in the 1970s, Manuel "El Loco Valdes" saw his long career cut short because he improvised a joke on national TV referring to President Benito Juarez and his wife as "Bomberito Juarez" and Doña "Manguerita Maza de Juarez".

There has never been another comedian in Mexico's history as famous and loved as Cantinflas (1911-1993). He received his "formal education" in the rough barrio of Tepito. Tepito is one of the districts of Mexico City that has best withstood the onslaught of urban modernization and is also distinguished for preserving its commercial vocation since pre-Hispanic times. The Aztecs did not allow Indians of that region to sell their products in the main market place and so they had to create their own where, according to Rafael Lopez Castillo, "thieves concurred to sell their stolen goods". This culture and the classic "albureo", a form of puny word play in which the slickest person wins, were the instruments that Mario Moreno used to forge his classic character.

Bullfighting is a thousand year old tradition from ancient Greece. It is an inheritance that the Spaniards brought to the continent, bound to disappear due to the three generations of Azcarragas heading Televisa (the main national TV channel) who have done everything possible to slowly substitute it with soccer. Cantinflas was also a bullfighter and the owner of a ranch that raised fighting bulls. At his bullfight appearances he would wear a shaded bullfight outfit with pants worn at the hips while hiding his behind with a long undershirt. His ability as a bullfighter was well proven when he did a series of passes with a bull without using a double in movies like "Ni Sangre, Ni Arena" (1941) and "El Padrecito" (1964). When he was young, he traveled around the country as part of a bullfight show.

The mime's fame grew with his incursion into cinema. By the time he arrived in Mazatlan he had already done various short films plus "No Te Engañes, Corazon" and "Asi Es Mi Tierra" (both from 1936) which made both him and Manuel Medel famous. "Aguila o Sol" (1937) is rated #87 among the best Mexican movies ever made. It was directed by Arcady Boytler, a disciple of Sergei Eisenstein who, like Cantinflas' wife Valentina and Schilinsky, was Russian.

Before his arrival in Mazatlan, he had started filming "El Signo de la Muerte". The argument and script were written by the multifaceted Salvador Novo and the music was composed by the musical genius Silvestre Revueltas. The movie debuted in December 1939. The crowning glory of the actor, "Ahi esta el Detalle" (The detail lies there)" (1940), was written and directed by Juan Bustillo Oro and is # 10 on the list of the best Mexican movies. In it appear well-known actors of the era such as Joaquin Pardave and Doña Sara Garcia.

According to Cantinflas the title of the movie came about from the nickname that the working class gave to marijuana. In the middle of a live performance, Cantinflas asks Medel "where lies the detail?" Medel stared at him dumbfounded, but some of the people in the audience realized he was talking about Cannabis and while some did not understand, others were convulsed with laughter.

The comedian's arrival in Mazatlan coincides with the historic moment when the country was grasping Cantinflas' peculiar style of talking. This is shown by advertisement in El Democrata inviting the public to witness what would be the "only opportunity to admire the famous comedian whose full-house performances for nearly 3 years in the nation's capital are a phenomenon never seen before."

According to Carlos Monsivais, an erudite in national issues and cinema, 1930's Mexico "was a poor community diminished by illiteracy" and he adds "for three decades the cinema and Cantinflas would be very important in the evolution and enrichment of the language and the sound of popular speech."

Going deeper into the issues of the language instituted by Cantinflas, Monsivais explains that the comedian represents "the eruption of the populace in popular language." This can be seen in the episode of the trial against Cantinflas when he is accused of murder in "Ahi Esta El Detalle". During the verdict, the judge, the defense attorney and the prosecutor end up speaking gibberish and playing with words, just like Cantinflas. With his triumph, he stops being just a delinquent and becomes a verbal hero that defeats the social establishment of the era.

The Royal Academy of the Spanish Language dictionary has 7 definitions for the word "Cantinflas" and their use and meaning vary from country to country. For example, in Chile the adjective "Cantinflero" is applied to a person that habitually says things without substance or foundation while in Cuba and Mexico the verb "Cantinflear" means to speak in a ludicrous fashion without really saying anything or to kind of act in this manner.

Cantinflas hit the big time in Hollywood when he acted in "Around the World in 80 Days" (1956). The movie won 5 Oscars and obtained 5 nominations and he shared credit with David Niven, Shirley McLaine, Frank Sinatra and Marlene Dietrich, among many others. A short while later he received a Golden Globe for Outstanding Comedy Performance. After this came "Pepe" (1960), a Hollywood co-production. He acted next to Carlos Montalban, Maurice Chevalier, Bing Crosby, Sammy Davis Jr., Zsa Zsa Gabor, Judy Garland, Jack Lemmon, Kim Novak and Debbie Reynolds. I remember having seen his star on the famous Hollywood Boulevard of the Stars along with his handprints in cement with the inscription "Cantinflas as Pepe".

Monsivais called the Cantinflas style "an epic force of nonsense" while at the same time questioning, "How do 99% of Mexicans speak today-ruling class included-if it is not with popular speech?" He also assures that "Mexico has become a country of popular speech due to functional illiteracy and lack of reading and a great part of this speech we owe to Cantinflas and his movies." This is confirmed by an "outsider", the Spanish writer Arturo Perez Reverte, author of the novel "La Reina del Sur" (a book whose plot takes place partially in Culiacan, Mexico). In an interview with Felix Linares, Perez Reverte said that when he arrived in Mexico he was surprised by the speech and he said "wow! everyone speaks like Cantinflas! It was truly a big surprise for me and I was perplexed. Certainly we must take into account that Cantinflas success came mainly because he spoke like the people. That is the issue or "the detail" as he would have said."

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Scene from the movie "Ahi esta el detalle", with actor Joaquin Pardave and Mario Moreno "Cantinflas"

 

 

Scene form the movie "Ahi esta el detalle", with actress Dolores Camarillo Fraustita and Mario Moreno "Cantinflas"