Salón México

Known as “El Indio” because of his ancestry, director Emilio Fernández was for many years the single most important figure in Mexican cinema. His major works were created in close collaboration with master cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa (who also worked with Buñuel); their striking beautiful visual style and explorations of folkloric themes and characters won an international reputation for both Fernández and Mexican cinema in the 1940s. French critic and historian Georges Sadoul compared Fernández’s “national portraits” to the murals of Diego Rivera and Siqueiros. Salón México is a stylish, well acted, beautifully shot melodrama. Marga López, a major Mexican star of the ’40s and ’50s, plays Mercedes, a lower-class woman who works as a dancehall girl in order to put her more respectable younger sister through private school. When Mercedes wins a dance contest with sleazy Paco (Rodolfo Acosta), her pimp, he refuses to share the money with her, leading inevitably to tragedy. “[An] engagingly exotic melodrama . . . inspired (like Aaron Copland’s suite of the same name) by the eponymous Mexico City dance club . . . Figueroa’s noir photography and the splendidly glamorous seediness of the nightclub scenes make for passable entertainment” (Geoff Andrew, Time Out). B&W, 35mm, in Spanish with English subtitles. 95 mins.