If it is true that people rarely get added to the schedule through Cop Rock—and it is—it’s even more rare that they get added to the schedule through what I lump together as Movies With Puppets In The Corner. That’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 and its, let’s be real, spin-off properties. And in fact Ninón Sevilla was added because of a RiffTrax. What’s more, this isn’t a Charade situation, where you can’t quite believe they’re riffing such a classic even if it is in the public domain. Yambaó is not a good movie. On the other hand, Ninón Sevilla is clearly too good for it.
Most countries that have a film industry at all have a rich and varied film industry that doesn’t ever fully become known to the average person in other countries. We share enormous amounts of pop culture with the UK and Canada, and all three countries have major celebrities that are a mystery to people from the others—and that’s even true of the US, which exports so much of its pop culture. Therefore it should not be terribly surprising to discover an entire genre of Mexican film that flourished in the 1940s and ‘50s that wasn’t exported much to the United States. These were the rumberas, and Sevilla is considered one of the great icons of the genre.
A rumbera is a film with a rumba beat. So far, so simple. They seem, however, to have been influenced by both films noir and the great ‘30s musicals of Busby Berkeley. The films generally involved women who were forced into sin of some kind and then had to pay for it, because you’ve always got to pay for sin in movies from that era. There were dance numbers, of course, and of course they were rumba ones. I am far from an expert on the genre, but it seems based on a quick investigation that Sevilla was a true great in them.
For one thing, she was more than just an actress and dancer. Now, saying “just” an actress and dancer is silly, because both of those take a lot of work to do well. She sang and choreographed. She apparently developed her own team to make the movies she was in to make sure they went the way she wanted them to. When the genre began to fade, she retired, probably because she knew what she was best at and wasn’t interested in doing other than her best. Then she went back to work after a decade, after which she finally began to be given her due.
And, okay, the only movie of hers that I’ve seen is Yambaó. I’m sorry about that, honestly, because it’s clear that she deserves better than that movie. The dancing is too good for the movie, and if she choreographed it herself, that means she was not merely capable of dancing like that but could visualize that it’s how the dancing should go. No less a light than Truffaut himself admired her dancing, saying how obvious it was that she was dancing for pleasure. That’s the kind of dancing I like to watch best myself.
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