User:Rockero/Mario Moreno

Cantinflas
Mario Moreno "Cantinflas"
Born
12 August 1911 Mexico City, Mexico
Occupation
Actor, 1936-1982

Mario Moreno Reyes (August 12, 1911 – April 20, 1993) was a comedian of the Mexican theatre and film industry. His interpretation of Cantinflas, a character originating in the "pelado", the impoverished campesino-cum-slumdweller that came to represent the national identity of Mexico, earned him popularity with the common people that he was able to parlay into a long, successful film career that included a foray into Hollywood. Charlie Chaplin once called him "the greatest comedian in the world," and he is often referred to as the "Charlie Chaplin of Mexico".

While some of films were dubbed into English for American audiences, and his work found some favor among the people of France, the wordplay of his Spanish-language humor did not translate particularly well into other languages. However, he was wildly successful in Latin America, where he still has many devoted fans.

As a pioneer of the cinema of Mexico, Moreno helped usher in its golden era. His success, as part of Mexico's cinematic blossoming, helped establish Mexico as the entertainment capital of Latin America. In addition to being a business leader, he also became involved in Mexico's tangled and often dangerous labor politics. Although he was himself politically conservative, his reputation as a spokesperson for the downtrodden gave his actions authenticity and became important in the early struggle against charrismo, the one-party government's practice of coopting and controlling unions.

Moreover, his character Cantinflas, whose identity became enmeshed with his own, was examined by media critics, philosophers, anthropologists, and linguists, who saw in him variably as danger to Mexican society, a bourgeois puppet, a kind philantropist, a venture capitalist, a transgressor of gender roles, a pious Catholic, a verbal innovator, and a picaresque underdog.

In effect, Moreno was all of these. His character Cantinflas, in attempting to encompass the identity of an entire nation, developed the contradictions and complexities inherent in any attempt to epitomize a country as complex and contradictory as Mexico.

Early life

Moreno was born the fourth of eight surviving children to Soledad Reyes, who married against the will of her well-bred family. It is said that Soledad Reyes, was already pregnant before being sent to Mexico City, in order to safeguard her reputation. There she met Pedro Moreno Esquivel, who married her even though he knew she was expecting. This act of disobedience meant that the family had to survive on Moreno Esquivel's meager salary as a public servant. They settled in a home on Santa María la Redonda in the working class colonia Guerrero of the Mexican Federal District's Cuauhtémoc delegación, not far from the night life centered in Plaza Garibaldi. Guerrero was also home to the infamous Tepito, known for its thieves market.

Though he later claimed to have studied medicine or law, childhood acquaintances recall him spending more time at the cinema and in the pool hall. At 16, he joined the army to fight in the Mexican Revolution, and was stationed in Ciudad Juárez, where he organized a small theatre group that put on the play Las travesuras de Marte ("The mischief of Marty").

His father secured his discharge by proving his status as a minor, and the young Moreno returned home. He next tried his hand a prizefighting, but his failure caused him to focus on his other talents. He danced the Charleston in the travelling theatre company of Nacho Pérez, but his first acting role was with a carpa theatre troupe in Cuernavaca.

Carpa theatre

In 1930, Moreno began performing with the Carpa Sotelo in Azcapotzalco. Three years later, he joined the Carpa Valentina, where he met his future wife. The troupe's writer, Emilio Shilinsky, coached him and wrote material. Gregorio Ivanoff, owner of the Carpa Valentina, disapproved of Moreno's intentions toward his daughter and refused to increase his salary, even when the writer-actor duo turned it into the most successful carpa in Mexico City.

After six months, he and Shilinsky left the Valentina Carpa and were booked at Salón Mayab, just across Plaza Garibaldi. There Moreno sharpened his improvisational techniques against some of the best theatre performers in Mexico.

It was in the carpa theatre that he earned the nickname "Cantinflas"; however, the origin of the name is obscured by legend. According to some sources, "Cantinflas" is a meaningless name invented to prevent his parents from knowing he was in the entertainment business, which they considered a shameful occupation. In another version, the Mexican media critic and theorist Carlos Monsiváis cites a legendary account of the origin of Cantinflas' characteristic speech:

"According to a legend that he agrees with, a young Mario Moreno, overwhelmed by stage fright, once, in the Ofelia carpa, forgets his original monologue. He begins to say what comes to mind in a complete emancipation of phrases and words, and what comes to mind is an incoherent brilliance. His assistants recite his attack on syntax, and Mario becomes aware of it: destiny has placed in his hands the distinctive characteristic, the style that is manipulation of chaos. Weeks later, the name that will mark the invention is invented. Someone, taken in by the nonsense, screams: "Cuanto inflas!" [C' ntinflas] (You're annoying!) or "En la cantina inflas!" (You become egotistical in the barroom). The contraction catches on and becomes proof of the baptism that the character needs."

Cantinflas

The "Cantinflas" character has distant origins in the trickster characters of European folktales and Aztec myths, and the rogue characters of the picaresque novel. Its more immediate origins are in the media portrayals of the pelado that directly preceded "Cantinflas". By the time Moreno began his interpretations, the pelado was already a well-established stock character in the carpa theater, having grown out of earlier types and theatrical representations such as the puppet Vale Coyote. Chupamirto, a pelado comic strip character , bore many of the attributes that were later become incorporated into "Cantinflas", and Moreno even worked with José Muñoz Reyes, Chupamirto's creator, in the carpa theatre.

The essence of "Cantinflas" is a destitute citydweller who, while possessing a multitude of marketable skills, is forced by the prevailing poverty to survive by his wits. His mustache covers only the corners of his upper lip, revealing his mestizaje--the Indian blood that does not allow him to grow "proper" facial hair. He wears a porter's gabardine, and a small hat rather than the typical sombrero in order to facilitate his carrying loads. His patch-covered pants, held up by only a rope or an old necktie, droop just below the waistline to partially expose his underpants in an irreverent running gag.

The screenwriters Guz Águila, Alfredo Robledo, and Carlos León contributed to the development of the character through their material, and writers such as the philosopher Samuel Ramos and the critic Salvador Novo helped shape his public image. But the most distinctive aspect of the "Cantinflas" character, the one that brought him fame, was the characteristic introduced by Moreno himself via his improvisations: his distinctive manner of speech.

La cantinflada

When the Real Academia Española included the verb "cantinflear" in its dictionary of the Spanish language in 1992, it was merely making official a usage that had long since become popular in the countries where "Cantinflas" films were shown. The Royal Academy defines the verb thus: "Hablar de forma disparatada e incongruente y sin decir nada" ("to speak in an unreasonable and incongruent manner without saying anything"). While this definition may adequately describe some of the nonsensical humor of Moreno's soliloquys, it does not describe their function. His manner of verbally confounding issues, wheedling favors, and impressing young ladies has been described as an example of "la vacilada", a term used by Octavio Paz to refer to the "vacillations" in the linguistic currents of Mexican Spanish. That is, double entendres, intentional vagueness, and elaborate discourses are used to subvert the language of authorities, provide a means of competitive "macho" one-upmanship, and as a basic and ultimate means of empowerment for the illiterate multitudes in Latin America. The cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis interprets the Moreno's discourse in terms of the importance of the spoken word in the context of Mexico's "reigning illiteracy" (70% in 1930). Particularly in the film El Analfabeto, ("The Illiterate"), "Cantinflas is the illiterate who takes control of the language by whatever means he can."

Neighbors from the Tepito barrio recognized inside jokes, but part of Cantinflas' appeal was the multiplicity of their interpretations. This allowed him to be understood in different ways in different countries, but always in an inevitably humorously way.

Cantinflismo

In 1936 Moreno made his debut in the "legitimate theatre" at Mexico City's Follies Bergère, named for the Folies Bergères in Paris. On October 15, José Furstenberg opened a show headlined by Amelia Wilhelmy and Manuel Medel. Following the debut, Moreno took the co-starring role opposite Medel and Furstenberg invested in the quality scripts of Carlos Riva, Guz Águila, and Alfredo Robledo.

Moreno's act was a carpa standard, a revista ("review") or humorous commentary on the news of the day. In his most renowned performances, he parodied the powerful Marxist union boss Vicente Lombardo Toledano. In one skit, the labor leader "Cantinflas" demanded more time off of his capitalist employer, who assented only as an excuse to raise prices. In these early skits, Moreno demostrated not only his nascent conservatism, but his talent for deflating the highfalutin speech of the powerful. Although this quality was debated, with some criticizing it as amounting a defense of the ruling elite, the comedian's power to make his audience laugh and to reduce the self important to a mundane level never was.

In 1937, it became clear that Moreno's humor was not entirely "unreasonable" or "meaningless". The magazine Todo published an anonymous editorial (written by Salvador Novo) about a labor conference that began with a reference to the rhetorical skills of "Cantinflas" and his co-star Miguel Medel. In it, Novo used the proletarian image of Cantinflas to criticize the "radical reforms" of the Cárdenas administration.

Vea magazine followed suit by appointing "Cantinflas" as a reporter to comment on current affairs, and the provocative Rotofoto announced the character's candidacy for President before being shut down by the government.

Lombardo Toledano's response was an attack against an old rival who had challenged him to a debate, Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers boss Luis Napoleón Morones: "If Morones proposes to demostrate his dialectical capabilities, he should debate with Cantinflas."

Now directly invoked in the debate, Moreno responded in the August 12 Todo interview The Polemic of the Century: Cantinflas vs. Morones:

"Ah! but let me make one thing clear, I have moments of lucidity, and I speak very clearly. And now I will speak with clarity...Friends! There are moments in my life that are really momentary...And it's not because one says it, but we must see it! What do we see? that's what we must see...because, what a coincidence, friends, that supposing that in the case—let's not say what it could be—but we must think about it and understand the psychology of life to make an analogy of the synthesis of humanity. Right? Well, that's the point!"

Cantinflismo, the political joke that challenged the notion that Cantinflas' nonsense was vacuous, was born. Carlos Monsiváis interpreted cantinflismo in the context of the left-leaning Cárdenas presidency, calling it a "mock[ery] of proletariat discourse from glorious senselessness".

Film career

Moreno recored over one hundred films during the the course of his career. However, many of them featured unoriginal plots (such as interpretations of European literary classics and Hollywood knock-offs) and repetitive jokes. In fact, Monsiváis once said that "only eight of Cantinflas' films were any good".

Moreno'ss film career began in August 1936, when Miguel Contreras Torres, the director responsible for the epic film biographies of José María Morelos and Simón Bolívar, took a stylistic turn and cast the stars of the carpa theatre in his comedy of manners No te engañes corazón. The film produced only modest returns at the box office, but it allowed Moreno, whose following was then only regional, to expose his humor to a larger audiences. Some of the comedic elements that would permeate his career are evident from the beginning: La cantinflada, aggressive flirting, macho posturing, and the drunk act, are among them.

The early films helped to develop the Cantinflas character, which changed over time. The character's evolution from pelado, to a respectable member of the middle class, to a figure who occasionally weilded some authority, is reflective of the changing shape of Mexican society and of Moreno's personal development.