Hollywood Goes Latin

Spanish-Language Cinema in Los Angeles

María de las Carreras, Jan-Christopher Horak

• Publisher: FIAF
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9782960029673
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

In the 1920s, Los Angeles enjoyed a buoyant homegrown Spanish-language culture comprised of local and itinerant stock companies that produced zarzuelas, stage plays, and variety acts. After the introduction of sound films, Spanish-language cinema thrived in the city's downtown theatres, screening throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s in venues such as the Teatro Eléctrico, the California, the Roosevelt, the Mason, the Azteca, the Million Dollar, and the Mayan Theater, among others. With the emergence and growth of Mexican and Argentine sound cinema in the early to mid-1930s, downtown Los Angeles quickly became the undisputed capital of Latin American cinema culture in the United States. Meanwhile, the advent of talkies resulted in the Hollywood studios hiring local and international talent from Latin America and Spain for the production of films in Spanish. Parallel with these productions, a series of Spanish-language films were financed by independent producers. As a result, Los Angeles can be viewed as the most important hub in the United States for the production, distribution, and exhibition of films made in Spanish for Latin American audiences.

In April 2017, the International Federation of Film Archives organized a symposium, "Hollywood Goes Latin: Spanish-Language Cinema in Los Angeles, " which brought together scholars and film archivists from all of Latin America, Spain, and the United States to discuss the many issues surrounding the creation of Hollywood's "Cine Hispano." The papers presented in this two-day symposium are collected and revised here.

This is a joint publication of FIAF and UCLA Film & Television Archive.

II

Production

Cita en Hollywood

Juan B. Heinink and Robert G. Dickson

With the advent of talking pictures, but before the development of successful dubbing and subtitling techniques, the major Hollywood studios and several independents produced versions of some of their films in foreign languages, including Spanish, French, and German, because they were fearful of the loss of international markets for their American films. Film production in the United States was dominated by five large companies: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount, Fox Film Corporation, United Artists and Warner Bros. The first four, well-established companies, had subsidiaries and agents all over the world, while Warner Bros. had recently become a major by being the first aboard the sound bandwagon after merging with First National. Harry Cohn’s Columbia and Carl Laemmle’s Universal were considered mini-majors. These companies produced 60% of all released films and possessed their own film factories, located in Hollywood and surrounding areas of Los Angeles. Some, like Paramount or Warner Bros., also owned studios in New York. A group of Poverty Row producers survived without their own studios in the shadow of Hollywood’s majors, such as Metropolitan, Tiffany, Educational, Darmour, Tec-Art, Chesterfield, World Wide, Tiffany, Sono-Art and Mascot. A peculiar case, worth noting, was Hal Roach’s studio. Based in Culver City, near the gigantic M-G-M, with which Roach had a distribution agreement, Hal Roach Studios had developed a formula for successfully producing comedy shorts. Roach, like the majors, would attempt Spanish-language film production after the coming of sound.

Some production companies organized contests outside the U.S. to find new faces. María Alba and Antonio Cumellas came to Hollywood as winners of a beauty contest that took place in Barcelona, promoted by Fox. María Alba did produce good results, but Cumellas failed. However, many other Spanish-speakers had previously arrived in Hollywood: Ramón Novarro, Antonio Moreno, Dolores del Río, and Gilbert Roland, followed by Lupe Vélez, Raquel Torres, Barry Norton, Mona Maris, Andrés de Segurola, Paul Ellis, Mona Rico, Soledad Jiménez, Lia Torá, Donald Reed, José Crespo and Lupita Tovar. In some cases, these actors had already started bringing to life Hispanic characters in sound films. Some production companies also had departments responsible for writing both the publicity materials, titles and intertiles in Spanish for films exported to Spain and Latin America. From this existing infrastructure, the studios considered producing directly in Spanish, but they waited for other companies to take the first step.

Spanish-language film production by the studio majors attracted Spanish-speaking writers, actors and directors to Hollywood, who—far from their familiar linguistic and cultural backgrounds—discovered that the promised land was not what it appeared to be. There was opportunity for writers from Spain to write Spanish dialogue, including Francisco Moré de la Torre at Fox, Salvador de Alberich at M-G-M, Carner Ribalta at Paramount, and Baltasar Fernández Cué at Universal. Instead of a life of luxury, they wandered from studio to studio in search of work. Carmen Guerrero, Alfonso Pedroza and Nancy Torres arrived from Mexico; María Calvo, Luis Llaneza, Carlos Villarías, and Rosita Granada from Spain; Vicente Padula from Argentina, and Ralph Navarro from the Philippines. Actors of Hispanic origin, like George Lewis, had to relearn a language they had forgotten. After a number of roles in shorts, Mexican baritone Rodolfo Hoyos couldn’t find work at any of the studios, while his wife, not an artist, was offered a contract. Also part of the unseen face of Hollywood were rehearsals, photo and screen tests, and unexpectedly low salaries, as well as plenty of other hidden miseries. A good remedy to forget these sorrows was to wear the most elegant dress in the closet and get an invitation to attend the gala premiere of the latest Spanish-language film, produced by a Hollywood studio. Moreover, it was necessary to be seen in the lobby of the Teatro México, the Million Dollar or the California, to snatch information about future projects, and to be noticed, in case a producer needed to discover a new face. Around midnight, members of the Hispanic community in California and their friends would attend the premiere party with news reporters, critics, and studio executives. While the hopefuls would roam around networking, trying to be photographed, a worried smile would cross the faces of the film’s producers and members of the cast. It was common for the sound reproduction systems to malfunction and no one could guarantee that it would not occur again. In any case, the technical mishap could very well become a good pretext to justify the failure of the film itself.

It is usually said, and perhaps it is true, that the first words in Spanish in a movie filmed in Hollywood were the ones pronounced by Soledad Jiménez, born in Spain, who was cast as a Mexican in the western In Old Arizona (1929, Irving Cummings). A silent version of the film premiered in Spain, but there are no records to prove it. It is not, however, a matter of great importance, because various productions were filmed along the border with Mexico, meaning any one of them could have produced a film with phrases or words in Spanish.

While the Hispanic world waited for Hollywood to present something more substantial than brief Spanish scenes in shorts, which gave local ambiance to typical songs, news from New York became a headline: Empire Productions Inc., a new company of independent producers, associated with the Latin American Underwriter Syndicate, announced the production of a group of twelve two-reel films, solely spoken and sung in Spanish. This would be the first sustained distribution of independent Spanish-language shorts. Presided over by Maurice A. Chase and Edmund Lawrence, a former associate producer at Paramount, Empire hired Arcady Boytler as their principal director, as well as Spanish baritones Fortunio Bonanova and Juan Pulido, among a roster of actors. Sombras vengadoras (Shadows of Revenge) opened the series, followed by Lawrence’s Flor de pasión (Flower of Passion), and comedies, such as Los Bombones del Abor (Abor’s Chocolates), musicals, such as Granada, concert and dance acts, and vaudeville numbers. Filmed through the latter half of 1929 at the Metropolitan Studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the films left few traces, making exact identification an impossible mission. After announcing an ambitious plan to produce forty-two new titles in 1930, Empire suddenly moved to Mexico.

Headed by impresario Juan J. Pablo, better known as the magician Li Ho Chang, Hispano America Movitonal Films, based in New York, launched a group of shorts that combined comedies and musical pieces, featuring performances by Mexican baritone Rodolfo Hoyos, Puerto Rican Orquesta Sanabria, and Madrid-born actress Carmen Rodríguez. A compilation, Revista Hispano-Americana (1930), was released to little acclaim in New York in January 1930. Carmen would return to Spain in 1935, after a lengthy career in Hollywood, and remained active until the late 1950s.

Hollywood reacted against the East Coast threat by releasing a number of short film comedies or musicals that had been in the works. It also introduced an invention that would generate much talk: dubbing. While a subsidiary of Universal Pictures, directed by the Chilean journalist Lucio Villegas, was quietly achieving success with the presentation of singer/dancer José Bohr in the short Una noche en Hollywood (A Night in Hollywood), Universal experienced a notable failure with the synchronized Spanish version of the musical Broadway (1929, Paul Fejos). A few months later, in a poll taken in Cuba, the dubbed version of Broadway received twelve favorable votes cast out of 3,098, ending up in last place among Spanish-language films released. Other markets chose to ignore this version, projecting the original sound version and rejecting this first dubbing experiment.

Enter René Cardona, a twenty-three-year-old Cuban who had acted as a young leading man next to Raquel Meller in the 1926 short La mujer del torero (The Bullfighter’s Wife). The adventurer had the audacity to produce the first American feature film, spoken in Spanish. Using minimal capital, he founded the Cuban International Company, shooting Sombras habaneras (Shadows of Havana) in Hollywood’s Tec-Art studios in September, 1929. The director was Cliff Wheeler, an Austrian aristocrat and military man, who would later return to film work under his real name, Alexis Thurn-Taxis. Unfortunately, the hopeful Cardona, who cast himself in a starring role, was the victim of an exaggerated streak of bad luck. It started with losing a good deal of the exposed negative, due to a fire at Consolidated Laboratories, and culminated with the cancellation of a crowded gala premiere in Los Angeles, due to a malfunction of the sound equipment. The businessman Rodolfo Montes offered to pay for the bills if the company changed its name to Hispania Talking Film Corp., which Cardona accepted. However, because the star of the film, Jacqueline Logan, did not speak a word of Spanish and her voice was dubbed by a Cuban, the critics denied Cardona the honor of having produced the first Spanish-language feature film. It was said that Sombras habaneras had an absurd subject, was badly directed, and even worse acted, with Spanish dialogue that sounded like a literal translation from English. Perhaps too much was expected, but to witness the screen debut of the Filipino Juan Torena, whose only artistic merit was to have played for a Barcelona soccer team, and to see Paul Ellis, an Argentine, sporting a French accent of his own invention, or the dancer Joyzelle exclaiming “ke-rram-ba!” elicited laughter to no end.

Sombras habaneras paved the way for Sombras de gloria (1930, Andrew L. Stone), which took home all the honors in 1930, thanks to great publicity, not only casting a shadow on its predecessor, but also shamelessly borrowing half its title. Sombras de gloria was the first picture filmed in Hollywood in two versions. The entrepreneurs O.E. Goebel, who made a fortune producing religious films, and George W. Weeks, an expert in film distribution, had founded a small company, Sono-Art, whose survival depended on a careful strategy of expansion. They looked for material that the market was not supplying. After trying a few shorts, starring Luana Alcañiz, they reached the conclusion that there was a business opportunity in making simultaneous versions of the same story, one in English for the domestic market, and another for export to the Spanish-language market. Sombras de gloria used the sets and technicians of the original Blaze O’ Glory (1929, George J. Crone, Renaud Hoffman), during the day, with Spanish-speaking actors repeating the scenes at night. Logically, the English version set the mark, but it sometimes occurred that variations introduced by the nocturnal group worked better, so the English-language cast had to reshoot the scene. Sombras de gloria achieved a significant success wherever it was shown, making José Bohr, the film’s protagonist, a very popular figure.

The majority of these films have been lost forever, the California Theatre long demolished for a parking lot, but the footprints left by those glorious premieres remain alive in press clippings. At the premiere of Sombras de gloria, film critic Lucio Villegas commented that José Bohr seemed to be singing when he spoke, and when he sang, he seemed to be reciting. After polling the public in attendance, R.M. Saavedra wrote that it was improper to showcase Un fotógrafo distraído (1930, Xavier Cugat) in first-class theatres because, simply put, the acting was indecent. Although he wanted to provide constructive criticism, Gabriel Navarro wrote with sadness after watching La rosa de fuego (1930, W. L. Griffith):

And the public, our good public, saw it without the least sign of protest, without losing composure, not in one single instant, with that almost oriental fatalism of our race, … Why is the film called La rosa de fuego? Where is the story supposed to take place? In what time period? The exterior scenes are out-of-synch, and on the sets, the slightest noise resonated like a cannon. Renée Torres forgets one of her lines and starts all over from her previous paragraph, as if it was a theatrical rehearsal.

Simultaneously filming two versions was a method that would have been forgotten, if it had not been for the mythical, bilingual, Dracula (1931, Tod Browning). Because Hispanics acted during the night shift, one might ask whether the moonlight could have produced the extraordinary effect of the film? In reality, simultaneous versions were seldom filmed. The method of repeating takes, using the same setup, but in different languages, started after the first bilingual comedies by Hal Roach. When only a small number of actors were substituted, problems were minimal, but with bigger casts, these productions became unwieldy.

Reviewing Hal Roach’s multilingual comedies provides unsuspected surprises. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, the most famous comic duo in the history of cinema, lived happily and quietly in Hal Roach’s small studio, dedicating themselves to the noble profession of punches, falls, chases, pie fights and flirts. In contrast to other comedians of the silent era, the coming of sound worked in their favor and their popularity was on the rise. As they told it, one day in fall 1929, Hal Roach announced they would have to make their shorts in Engli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• I Exhibition, Distribution, Reception
• II Production
• Bibliography
• Spanish-language Films Made in Hollywood (1929-1939)
• Author Biographies
• Index
• Acknowledgements