AVENTURERA (THE ADVENTURESS)

AVENTURERA (THE ADVENTURESS) Directed by Alberto Gout Mexico, Drama, Film Noir, Cabaret Musical, 1950 101 minutes, 35mm, Black and White In Spanish with English subtitles Starring: Ninon Sevilla, Tito Junco, Andrea Palma, Rubén Rojo, Miguel Inclan Musical performances by: Pedro Vargas, Ana María González, Los Angeles del Infierno, Perez Prado and his Orchestra, Trio Los Panchos, Ray Montoya and his Orchestra and Tona La Negra. Saturday, September 15, 2007 at 8PM Mexican-American Cultural Center Grand Opening Free admission. Mature audiences.

REVIEWS

"With its velvety black-and-white photography, parts of Aventurera look like film noir or Italian neo-realism, connections confirmed by the film's fixation on crime and class struggle."
- Gary Morris, Bright lights Film Journal

"The music and a seductive sensuality make ``Aventurera'' a tasty, stylish entertainment. The film almost plays like a dark, moody rumba, its melodrama winding through fateful twists and turns, its heroine an evolving portrait of a wronged woman daring to fight back to reclaim her dignity after defilement."
- Peter Stack, San Francisco Chronicle

"That's not acting that's Ninon dancing!"
- Francois Truffaut

ABOUT THE FILM

Released in 1950 and made in 1949, AVENTURERA is one of the most popular Mexican films ever made. It is extravagant melodrama, popular entertainment, film noir, cabaretera (cabaret musical), and a revenge film all in one glorious effort. The film has seldom been screened theatrically since its initial release.

Starring the immortal Ninon Sevilla, who Variety called "a cross between Rita Hayworth and Carmen Miranda," Sevilla plays Elena Tejero, a middle-class girl from Chihuahua who witnesses her mother's affair and her father's suicide, leaves Chihuahua for Ciudad Juarez and tries to make it and fails as a waitress and secretary, is sold into prostitution, and is transformed into a nightclub sensation - all in the first twelve minutes of the film.

Elena is more than just a good girl who falls from grace, she is the ultimate bombshell, a femme fatale both naive and wildly sensual who navigates a world that is run by the love and desires of the men around her. Elena survives one tragic event after another but she is not a pitiable victim. She is hell-bent on revenge at any cost. She quickly learns that the highest form of revenge against her transgressors is to ruin their "good name" by bringing scandal to their doorstep. The underlying message that "respectable" families of means gained their place through unsavory ways, and Elena's relentless crusade to uncloak the veil of hypocrisy is quite subversive, and a distinct indictment of Mexican high society.

Notably, both Elena's mother and mother in law in the film are characterized as hypocrites that lead to her ruination - this is not only contrary to the tradition of exalting the mother in Mexican Cinema but it's a sad, cold world when it is the mother who is at the root of your rotten life.

Andrea Palma, the Grande Dame of Mexican Cinema, who plays a cabaret owner and pimp, is Elena's primary nemesis in the film.

AVENTURERA is high melodrama without apology. Sevilla and Palma are each exquisite even through their venomous snarls and flaring nostrils. These are two powerful performances by fierce and beautiful women and you don't know until the end which will prevail or if they will ultimately destroy each other and everything around them.

"Melodrama in our Anglo culture is sort of a disparaged genre," says Michael Donnelly who is credited by the DVD distributor as "unearthing" the film. "It's held much higher as a literary form and as a form of popular entertainment in Latin countries. One could argue the case that AVENTURERA was the first of the great Latin melodramas, which now of course have become popular television and the greatest stars in Latin television today are the melodrama stars. So this was really the beginning of all that."

Francois Truffaut says of Ninon Sevilla, "Like so many missed arrows, [she is an] oblique challenge to bourgeois, Catholic, and all other moralities."In 1955 Truffaut said, "Is Ninón dancing for glory? No way, never. It is quite clear Ninón is dancing for pleasure!"

Aventurera, is a song by composer Augustin Lara. "Vende caro tu amor, Aventurera" Pedro Vargas sings in the film as Ninón Sevilla, covered in sequins glides across the cabaret. The film features spectacular musical interludes by the most popular musicians of Latin America.

AVENTURERA is photographed by Alex Phillips, considered one of the founders of Mexican National Cinema and one of the great masters of black and white cinematography.

– Jacqueline Rush Rivera

DIRECTOR ALBERTO GOUT'S SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY

El rapto de las sabinas (1960)
Sensualidad (1950)
Aventurera (1949)
Humo en los ojos (1946)
Una sombra en mi destino (1944)
Tuya en cuerpo y alma (1944)
San Francisco de Asís (1943)
Cuando viajan las estrellas (1942)
Café Concordia (1939)
Su adorable majadero (1938)

FILMMAKERS

Filmmakers: Alberto Gout - Director, Alvaro Custodio - Writer, Carlos Sampelayo - Writer, Guillermo Calderon - Producer, Pedro A. Calderon - Producer, Alex Phillips - Cinematographer, Antonio Diaz Conde - Composer, Manuel Fontanals - Production Designer, Alfredo Rosas Priego - Editor, Costume Designers - José Díaz

Miscellaneous Crew: Los Angeles del Infierno - Orchestra, Julián de Meriche - Choreographer, Antonio Díaz Conde - Music Arranger, Trío Los Panchos - Music Performers, Damaso Perez Prado - Music Arranger, Ninon Sevilla - Choreographer, Cinematográfica Calderón S.A.- Production Company