The Melodramatic Nation: Integration and Polarization in the Argentine Cinema of the 1930s

Matthew B. Karush

The 1930s represent a paradoxical decade within Argentine cultural history.

Historians in search of the origins of Peronism have uncovered rising class antagonisms in these years. The dislocations of import substitution industrialization and massive internal migration, along with the restricted political system ushered in by the military coup of 1930, deepened class resentment among workers, creating a receptive audience for Juan Perns populist message.1 But whereas this narrative emphasizes class-based polarization, a different historiography has stressed the integrative forces at work in these years. Beginning with several pioneering articles by Leandro Gutirrez and Luis Alberto Romero on Buenos Aires in the interwar period, this scholarship has charted the emergence of a new identity rooted in the citys rapidly expanding barrios, where homeownership was becoming a more accessible goal and where skilled and unskilled workers often lived alongside white-collar employees, small-business owners, and professionals. According to this interpretation, Argentinas dynamic econ-

I would like to thank the participants of the Washington Seminar on Latin American History, as well as Alison Landsberg, Mary Kay Vaughan, and the anonymous readers of the HAHR for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. 1. Although the historiography on the rise of Peronism is far too extensive to adequately summarize here, both the revival of labor militancy in the late 1930s and Argentine workers deepening experience of exploitation and disempowerment are matters of widespread consensus. See, for example, Miguel Murmis and Juan Carlos Portantiero, Estudios sobre los orgenes del peronismo (Buenos Aires: Siglo XX I, 1971); Juan Carlos Torre, La vieja guardia sindical y Pern: Sobre los orgenes del peronismo (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1990); Joel Horowitz, Argentine Unions, the State, and the Rise of Pern (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990); Daniel James, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 19461976 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), 740. For a recent account that argues for widespread working-class consciousness in the 1930s, see Nicols Iigo Carrera, La estrategia de la clase obrera, 1936 (Buenos Aires: PIMSA, 2000).
Hispanic American Historical Review 87:2 doi 10.1215/00182168-2006-131 Copyright 2007 by Duke University Press

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omy created real opportunities for social mobility in the 1920s and 1930s; in this context, the militant working-class consciousness of earlier years gave way to an identity that was less grounded in class. In fact, these historians downplay the relevance of social class in this period, preferring to explore the culture, values, and identity of the heterogeneous, undifferentiated popular sectors. Mostly Argentine-born children of immigrants, these popular sectors were intent on self-improvement and upward mobility; unlike their parents, they embraced integration into Argentine society as the means to a more comfortable life.2 Although the emphasis on mobility as both socioeconomic reality and widespread aspiration has illuminated the period, it is of only limited use in explaining the origins of Peronism. While Pern undoubtedly tapped into the desire for a higher standard of living, he also addressed his supporters in explicitly classist terms. In fact, while Pern initially sought to build a broad, multiclass movement, class polarization made it impossible to hold this coalition together. In light of these events, the notion that the pursuit of individual mobility had simply replaced working-class consciousness in the 1930s is unconvincing. The concept of the popular sectors obscures a complex process of identity formation marked by fluidity and ambiguity. The aspiration to a middle-class lifestyle must have coexisted with the persistence of working-class loyalties.3 In part, the shortcomings of the popular sectors historiography reflect the rather narrow range of sources on which it relies. Historians have exhaustively
2. Leandro Gutirrez and Luis Alberto Romero, Sectores populares, cultura y poltica: Buenos Aires en la entreguerra (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1995); Ricardo Gonzlez, Lo propio y lo ajeno: Actividades culturales y fomentismo en una asociacin vecinal. Barrio Nazca (19251930), in Mundo urbano y cultura popular, ed. Diego Armus (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1990), 91128; Luciano de Privitellio, Vecinos y ciudadanos: Poltica y sociedad en la Buenos Aires de entreguerras (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2003). Similarly, Fernando Rocchis recent analysis of the rise of a consumer society emphasizes that advertising and fashion encouraged the emulation of social superiors and the blurring of class distinctions. Rocchi, La americanizacin del consumo: Las batallas por el mercado argentino, 19201945, in Americanizacin: Estados Unidos y Amrica Latina en el siglo XX, ed. Mara Barbero and Andrs Regalsky (Buenos Aires: EDUNTREF, 2003), 13189. 3. This critique of the popular sectors idea is developed in Eduardo J. Mguez, Tensiones de identidad: Reflexiones sobre la experiencia italiana en la Argentina, in Asociacionismo, trabajo e identidad tnica: Los italianos en Amrica Latina en una perspectiva comparada, ed. Fernando Devoto and Eduardo J. Mguez (Buenos Aires: CEMLA, 1992), 35457. On Perns failure to overcome class polarization, see Mariano Plotkin, Maana Es San Pern: Propaganda, rituales polticos, y educacin en el rgimen peronista, 19461955 (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1993), 4264.

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analyzed the myriad new barrio associations, newspapers, and popular libraries that preached the gospel of upward mobility. But they have yet to show much interest in one of the other major developments of the period: the explosion of mass culture. Apart from some creative analyses of tango lyrics, historians have generally been content to cite the omnipresence of radios and movie theaters in the barrios as factors that encouraged the pursuit of upward mobility and weakened class consciousness.4 Yet the conservative impact of mass culture cannot simply be assumed. By overlooking the content of the films, music, and radio theater consumed in the barrios, historians have missed a crucial window onto the paradoxical cultural universe of the 1930s. This article will begin to rectify this oversight by exploring the domestic cinema produced in the years following the introduction of sound film in 1933. In this period, Argentine movies became a major attraction in the barrios of Buenos Aires and beyond, generating powerful images and discourses about class and nation. An examination of these films can help clarify how a mass culture that reflected an increasingly integrated society also contained the raw materials for the deep polarization of the Pern years. While historians have paid scant attention to the Argentine cinema of the 1930s, film scholars have produced many excellent studies of its forms and conditions of production, genre development, models of representation, as well as the styles of individual filmmakers.5 Although film-studies scholarship has not directly engaged the questions that cultural historians have raised, it tends to corroborate their assumptions about the cinemas ideological effects. Film melodrama, extremely important in this period, has typically been considered a con-

4. For examples of tango lyrics as historical sources, see James, Resistance and Integration, 2627; and Donna J. Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1990), 14174. Nevertheless, the recent Nueva historia argentina confirms the general tendency. While the essay on popular identity in the 1930 s mentions film, radio, and soccer only in passing, sustained consideration of mass culture is relegated to a separate volume on art, society, and politics. See Ricardo Gonzlez Leandri, La nueva identidad de los sectores populares, in Nueva historia argentina, vol. 7, Crisis econmica, avance del estado e incertidumbre poltica (19301943), ed. Alejandro Cattaruzza (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2001), 20137. 5. Domingo Di Nbilas pioneering history of the Argentine cinema established many interpretations that still shape the field. See Di Nbila, La poca de oro: Historia del cine argentino I (1960; Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Jilguero, 1998). More recent film scholarship on the 1930s and 1940s is effectively and exhaustively summarized in Claudio Espaas monumental compilation, Cine Argentino: Industria y clasicismo, 19331956, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires: Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 2000).

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servative genre, both in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America.6 Moreover, while scholars have recognized several progressive moments in early Argentine film historynotably, the urban realism of Jos Agustn Ferreyra and the social criticism of Mario Sofficis rural dramasthey have stressed the industrys conformist tendencies. According to the dominant narrative, the growth of the domestic studios in the late 1930s and early 1940s pushed filmmakers away from populist realism and toward either more aesthetically daring, intellectual material or bland, middle-class entertainments and consumerist fantasies.7 This article, by contrast, seeks to demonstrate that the Argentine cinema was ideologically ambivalent from its inception. Under pressure to compete with Hollywood, local filmmakers tried to imitate the technological and ideological achievements of their North American counterparts. Yet they also needed to differentiate their products in order to attract a domestic audience. Toward that end, they relied heavily on existing popular culturein particular, the rich melodramatic tradition embodied in the tango songs, popular theater, and pulp fiction of the preceding decades. Attempting to modernize and improve the domestic cinema, as well as to lure wealthier customers away from Holly wood movies, they worked to eliminate (or at least clean up) plebeian cultural

6. As Jess Martn-Barbero has put it, The melodrama made it possible for film to . . . dissolve tragedy in a pool of tears, depoliticizing the social contradictions of daily life; Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations, tr. Elizabeth Fox and Robert A. White (London: Sage, 1993), 167. See also Silvia Oroz, Melodrama: El cine de lgrimas de Amrica Latina (Mexico City: UNAM, 1995); Carlos Monsivis, Se sufre, pero se aprende (El melodrama y las reglas de la falta de lmites), Archivos de la Filmoteca 16 (1994): 10. 7. Tamara Falicov has described Ferreyra and Soffici as practitioners of an alternative working-class cinema, but she argues that progressive filmmaking ended by the 1940s. See Tamara L. Falicov, Argentine Cinema and the Construction of National Popular Identity, 19301942, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 17 (1998): 6178. This trend is associated with the decline of social realism, the rise of the so-called white-telephone comedies set in luxurious interiors, and the increasing use of the generic t in place of the distinctively Argentine vos. See Di Nbila, La poca de oro, 28184; Tim Barnard, Popular Cinema and Populist Politics, in Argentine Cinema, ed. Tim Barnard (Toronto: Nightwood, 1986), 2549; and Jos Agustn Mahieu, Imgenes del pasado: Panorama histrico del cine argentino en los aos 30, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 481 (July 1990): 8190. The emergence of new film companies in the early 1940s seeking to produce more sophisticated films is well established in the literature. See Paula Flix-Didier, Soando con Hollywood: Los estudios Baires y la industria cinematogrfica en Argentina, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 21 (2002): 77103; and Csar Maranghello, La epopeya trunca: Artistas Argentinas Asociados (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Jilguero, 2002).

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elements. But lowbrow and potentially subversive traditions remained crucial to the industrys commercial strategy. Drawing on the insights of feminist film studies, I will expose the persistent ideological instability of the films shaped by these contradictory forces. Through direct comparisons with North American films, I will demonstrate how the tension between subversive and conformist messages prevented the Argentine cinema from elaborating the sort of unifying national myths produced by Hollywood in this era. It is by now commonly accepted that mass-cultural commodities like films do not directly reflect the consciousness of the audiences who consume them. Although designed to appeal to a mass audience, films are shaped by a host of factors, including cultural traditions, individual artistic visions, commercial pressures, critical responses, and the structure of the film industry. Moreover, reception is not passive; viewing a film is an act of meaning-making, inseparable from its historical context. Nevertheless, mass culture does provide consumers with crucial material from which to forge their own consciousness, and while films are open to multiple readings, they are not infinitely malleable.8 In order to uncover the particular meanings that movie audiences make in a specific historical moment, historians need to attend to both the conditions of reception and the filmic discourse itself. Here I draw on popular film magazines and the mainstream press to establish the composition of Argentine film audiences in the 1930s, as well as the cultural and ideological context within which the films were produced and consumed. I then examine a group of films featuring several of the acknowledged box-office champions of the day: movie stars Libertad Lamarque and Luis Sandrini and director Manuel Romero. I have chosen to focus on two genresmelodrama and comedy (which was itself deeply structured by melodramas guiding principles)precisely because they have often been dismissed as conservative or conformist. Although source limitations prevent me from determining precisely how individuals interpreted these films, my analysis does reveal their essential ambivalence. As a whole, the Argentine cinema pushed simultaneously toward national integration and class polarization.

8. Decades worth of scholarship in both cultural studies and cultural history supports this perspective. See, for example, John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 5154; and Lawrence W. Levine, The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and Its Audiences, American Historical Review 97, no. 5 (1992): 136999.

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Although Argentine filmmakers achieved a few commercial successes during the silent eramost notably Nobleza gaucha (Cairo, 1915)they were generally overwhelmed by competition from Hollywood and Europe. Local film production increased during the late 1910s, when World War I interrupted the flow of foreign films into Argentina, but by 1920, the U.S. film industry had recovered its position of dominance. For the rest of the silent period, Argentine filmgoers followed the exploits of Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, and Greta Garbo and were only very rarely able to see an Argentine production. As late as 1931, only four Argentine films were released; in 1932, that number had dropped to two. But the introduction of sound would transform the Argentine film industry. In 1933, the countrys first two modern studiosArgentina Sono Film and Lumitonwere created in order to produce sound films for the domestic market. The industry took off almost immediately, growing steadily over the next decade. Local filmmakers released 13 films in 1935, 28 in 1937, 41 in 1938, and an average of 50 films each year between 1939 and 1942. By 1937, Buenos Aires hosted nine film studios and 30 production companies.9 Argentine films gained a significant share of the domestic market, despite the enormous competitive advantage enjoyed by the big U.S. firms. Since Hollywood studios enjoyed direct access to the worlds largest domestic market, they entered foreign markets needing only to recover distribution costs. Argentine competitors, in contrast, had to recover the entire cost of production from the local market. Moreover, the large U.S. companies made a concerted effort to capture the Argentine market; by 1935, Paramount, Metro, Warner, Fox, Columbia, Universal, and United Artists all had branch offices not only in Buenos Aires but in the important provincial cities as well. In contrast to these powerful companies, Argentine film studios were tiny operations. Lacking the bargaining power of their foreign rivals, Argentine producers were unable to secure a distribution system that guaranteed them a percentage of the gross receipts. Forced to sell films to distributors on a flat-fee basis and lacking any protectionist assistance from the government, they remained severely undercapitalized.10 But if the domestic film industry faced adverse economic conditions, other factors favored its growth. Local film producers benefited from the long tradition of popular theater in Argentina, particularly the short musical

9. Jorge Alberto Schnitman, The Argentine Film Industry: A Contextual Study (PhD diss., Stanford Univ., 1979), 34, 63, 68. 10. Ibid., 6672.

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comedy known as the sainete; by providing comparable entertainment at a lower admission price, they could capture this existing audience. At the same time, an important segment of this audience was reluctant or unable to read the subtitles that accompanied films in English.11 But perhaps most important, the Argentine films of the 1930s must have spoken to local audiences in a way that Hollywood films could not. Argentine movies were set in familiar locales. They starred actors who spoke Spanish in the local dialect and who were often recognizable to filmgoers from their previous careers in theater and radio. And as products of the local milieu, these films addressed themes of particular relevance to Argentine audiences. From the beginning of the sound era, the movies were a popular source of entertainment in Argentine cities. As early as 1929, 972 theaters showed movies in the country as a whole, 152 of them in the city of Buenos Aires.12 Seven years later, Argentina ranked first in Latin America, with 1,425 movie theaters.13 On the basis of film receipts for 1942, the U.S. Commerce Department calculated that the average Argentine went to the movies seven or eight times per year.14 Many of these moviegoers belonged to the ranks of the working poor. Of the 147 theaters listed on one porteo newspapers movie page in 1939, 101 were located in the barrios outside the city center, and as early as 1930, even predominately working-class areas like Pompeya and La Boca had their own movie theaters.15 Admission prices were high at the downtown, first-run theaters: 1.50 pesos for the balcony and 2.50 for orchestra seats. But barrio movie houses were much more accessible to popular audiences. There, tickets went for as little as 20 centavos, at a time when unskilled workers earned between four and eight pesos a day, on average. For that relatively low price, patrons at barrio theaters were entitled to a program of at least three, and as many as five, feature films.16 In the barrios, the movies were a cheap night out, affordable even for manual laborers. The weekly magazine of Argentinas principal union confederation (the CGT)
11. Ibid., 6162. In the early 1930s, Argentine entertainment magazines frequently demanded films in Spanish. See Sintona, Aug. 5, 1933, 79. 12. Motion Pictures in Argentina and Brazil (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1929), 15. 13. Nathan D. Golden, Review of Foreign Film Markets during 1936 (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1937), 176. 14. Nathan D. Golden, Motion Picture Markets of Latin America (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1944), 23. 15. El Mundo, June 29, 1939, 3031, 34; on Pompeyas movie theater, see Luis Alberto Romero, Nueva Pompeya, libros y catecismo, in Gutirrez and Romero, Sectores populares, 176. 16. Golden, Motion Picture Markets, 2324. Average daily wage rates are listed on p. 19.

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probably only exaggerated slightly when it declared that 90% of the audience for film production is found among our readership.17 Not coincidentally, the CGT magazines claim was part of an appeal directed at Argentine filmmakers. While Argentines of all social classes enjoyed Hollywood films, the audience for domestic movies was composed primarily of the heterogeneous lower and middle classes. As a U.S. Commerce Department publication reported, The so-called better class Argentine . . . has a predilection for American films.18 In fact, for much of the 1930s, many first-run theaters downtown refused to show Argentine films at all, and the film industry trade paper, El Heraldo del Cinematografista, labeled most domestic productions suitable, preferably, for popular cinemas.19 In the 1939 movie listings cited above, only 30 percent of downtown theaters were showing any Argentine films. But among the barrio theaters, the figure rose to 53 percent, with most barrio theaters offering several domestic productions.20 The movies constituted a cultural field marked by a hierarchy of taste. At the top of this hierarchy were the major new Hollywood films, shown for a high price at fancy downtown theaters. At the other end of the spectrum were Argentine films, shown at barrio theaters at prices accessible to nearly all. Despite the success of the domestic film industry, the ongoing competition with Hollywood made the cinema a site of national anxiety. The foreign cinema was often figured as a dangerous seducer who threatened to woo local girls away from Argentine men. In a 1931 newspaper column, novelist Roberto Arlt worried that women who watched movies would become disillusioned with their own lives. He reports the words of a female informant, referring to an American film star popular in the Spanish-speaking world: I have known many very happily married women who, after a year of going to the movies, looked at their husbands as if to say to them, Ramn Novarro smokes more elegantly than

17. Cited in Elina Tranchini, El Cine Argentino y la construccin de un imaginario criollista 19151945, Entrepasados 9, no. 18/19 (2000): 140n29. 18. Golden, Motion Picture Markets, 24. 19. See, for example, the descriptions of Riachuelo (Moglia Barth, 1934) and Ayudame a vivir (Ferreyra, 1936) in El Heraldo del Cinematografista, July 11, 1934, and Sept. 2, 1936. The U.S. Commerce Department commented in 1944 that not so long ago Argentine films were shown in only one first-run house in Buenos Aires. 20. I arrived at these numbers by cross-referencing the listings in El Mundo, June 29, 1939, 3031, 34, with Ral Manrupe and Mara Alejandra Portela, Un diccionario de films argentinos (19301995) (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2001). The percentage of barrio theaters showing Argentine movies would be higher if I excluded well-to-do districts such as Norte, where only one of seven theaters was showing a domestic film.

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you.21 Once Argentina began producing its own sound films, the competition with Hollywood was depicted as a matter of national pride. The fan magazine Sintona regularly ran ads calling on readers to attend Argentine films: Watch Argentine movies in your neighborhood theater: Its patriotic.22 Likewise, movie critics used each review of an Argentine film as an occasion to measure the technological and artistic progress of the nations film industry against the Hollywood standard. Eventually, the success of the local cinema gave Argentine men the chance to undo their emasculation. In 1939, the film and radio magazine Radiolandia actually celebrated the suicide of a girl from the province of Misiones, whose desperation was caused by the recent death of local film star Jos Gola. The fact that Argentine girls were killing themselves for national idols as they had once done for Rudolph Valentino represented a major victory: [T]he criollo competition has grown sizeable and strong.23 The domestic film industrys subordinate relationship to its North American rival decisively shaped the movies it produced, encouraging Argentine filmmakers both to emulate the high technological and artistic standards set by Hollywood and to distinguish their products from the competition. These filmmakers sought to elaborate what Miriam Hansen, in a different context, has called an alternative vernacular modernism, a reconfiguration of North American models of genre, cinematography, and style that could articulate the fantasies and anxieties of the Argentine mass public.24 While they could not hope to replicate the lavish budgets of American films, Argentine filmmakers realized that they could attract audiences by producing movies steeped in local popular culture. The model for this approach was provided by the enormously successful movies of Argentine tango singer Carlos Gardel. These films, produced by Paramount between 1931 and Gardels death in 1935, demonstrated

21. Roberto Arlt, Notas sobre el cinematgrafo, ed. Gastn Sebastin M. Gallo (Buenos Aires: Simurg, 1997), 82. On the masculine fear of foreign movie stars like Rudolph Valentino, see Sergio Pujol, Valentino en Buenos Aires: Los aos veinte y el espectculo (Buenos Aires: Emec, 1994), 10710. Frustration over the inability to attain the lifestyles depicted in Hollywood films was a common reaction among moviegoers throughout the world in the 1920s. For the cases of the U.S. and Cuba, see Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 18701920 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 221; and Louis Prez, On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1999), 290353. 22. See Sintona, Aug. 19, 1937, and July 15, 1937. 23. Radiolandia, Aug. 12, 1939. 24. Miriam Hansen, Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism, Film Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2000): 1022.

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the commercial potential of movies that were not only spoken in Spanish but were also showcases for the tango.25 Aiming to replicate this success, local film companies drew heavily on actors, directors, and thematic material from the porteo theater and radio. The first two Argentine sound films established the strategy: Tango, released in 1933 by Argentina Sono Film, featured many of the most popular tango singers of the day and a plot that recycled the conventions and stereotypes of tango songs, while Los tres berretines, released that same year by Lumiton, was an adaptation of a sainete that had been a hit on the Buenos Aires stage the year before. Throughout the 1930s, Argentine movies continued to feature music and thematic material drawn from the tango and the sainete.26 By repackaging Argentine popular culture, the local film industry could differentiate its products from Hollywood movies while appealing to an established audience. Moreover, by disseminating these local cultural practices on a massive scale, Argentine movies promoted the integration of recent migrants from the countryside and working-class children of immigrants into a common national culture.27 But the strategy had other effects as well. The tango and the sainete were useful to the film industry because they were widely seen as quintessentially Argentine. At the same time, though, both the tango and the sainete had obvious class connotations. Disdained by elites and intellectuals as lowbrow or worse, both cultural forms explicitly addressed a lower-class audience. The tendency to represent the nation with plebeian symbols like the gaucho and the tango singer had long been a source of concern for Argentine elites and intellectuals.28
25. Simon Collier, Carlos Gardel and the Cinema, in The Garden of Forking Paths: Argentine Cinema, ed. John King and Nissa Torrents (London: BFI, 1988), 1536. 26. Although I do not consider it here, a third popular cultural tradition was a crucial source for the Argentine cinema of the 1930s: criollismo. This popular literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries celebrated the exploits of brave and violent gauchos. Its influence on the cinema can be seen in the films of Mario Soffici and in such classics as La guerra gaucha (Demare, 1942). On criollismo in Argentine cinema, see Tranchini, El cine argentino. 27. Elina Tranchini has emphasized this integrative function for the specific case of the criollista cinema; ibid., 125. 28. On elite hostility to moreirismo, the nationalist cult of Juan Moreira, the violent hero of popular gaucho legends, see Adolfo Prieto, El discurso criollista en la formacin de la Argentina moderna (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1988); and Patricia Funes, Nacin, patria, argentinidad: La reflexin intelectual sobre la nacin en la dcada de 1920, in Representaciones inconclusas: Las clases, los actores y los discursos de la memoria, 19121946, ed. Waldo Ansaldi, Alfredo Pucciarelli, and Jos Villaroel (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 1995), 133. On efforts to repress the tango, see Guy, Sex and Danger, 14344.

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The prominence of popular cultural referents in the cinema provoked similar anxieties. Although official censorship remained limited in the 1930s, criticism of the supposed bad taste displayed in national films was ubiquitous in the print media.29 In Crtica, Ulyses Petit de Murat denounced [c]ertain dishes seasoned with heavy sauces, certain situations that offend good taste, the crudeness of the photodramatic style of many films.30 Likewise, in El Mundo, film reviewer Calki (Raimundo Calcagno) insisted that Our cinema needs style!31 while his colleague, Nstor (Miguel Paulino Tato), irritated movie fans by fulminating against the vulgarity and poor taste displayed in local films.32 For these critics, what threatened the cultural level of Argentine cinema was precisely its tendency to borrow from lowbrow cultural forms such as the tango and the sainete. In its review of Los tres berretines, the conservative film magazine Cinegraf put it succinctly: We have been denouncing a cinema based on specimens from working-class suburbs, on carnival parade peasants. It seems to us equally absurd that films should be distorted with immigrants from the sainete in order to degenerate into situations that can never fully reflect the life of the nation, and that they should appeal to the comic effect of low-class street language [lenguaje arrabalero], whose inherent bad taste is undoubtedly damaging.33 Bad taste, according to this reviewer, was epitomized by the tango and the sainete, cultural forms that sprung from the suburbios and arrabales that were home to Buenos Aires plebeian masses. While Cinegraf s conservative politics and glossy covers stood out among Argentine film magazines, its elitist hostility toward popular culture did not.34 Most film reviewers were ambivalent about the local cinemas appropriation of lowbrow cultural forms. They wanted Argentine films to emphasize the
29. Csar Maranghello, Cine y Estado, and Orgenes y evolucin de la censura, in Espaa, Cine argentino, 2:24183. 30. Cited in Maranghello, Cine y Estado, 27. 31. El Mundo, May 28, 1939, 14. 32. El Mundo, Sept. 7, 1934, 15. The film under review is the Carlos Gardel vehicle Cuesta abajo (1934). See also May 23, 1935, 28, in which Nstor congratulates the film Monte Criollo for avoiding any degenerate note or bad taste, without any concessions and with commendable dignity. In a letter to Sintona, one reader attacked Nstors persistent negativism in patriotic terms: He doesnt do anything but speak ill of our national films. Its not possible to believe that this gentleman is Argentine; Sintona, Sept. 30, 1937. 33. Cited in Claudio Espaa, El modelo institucional: Formas de representacin en la edad de oro, in Espaa, Cine argentino, 1:48. 34. Cinegraf, edited by the quasifascist Carlos Alberto Pessano, distinguished itself through its focus on Hollywood and its elitist attacks on Argentine cinema. See Csar Maranghello, El espacio de la recepcin, in Espaa, Cine argentino, 2:55152.

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national without catering to the uncultured tastes of the popular sectors. In its positive review of La vida de Carlos Gardel, a biopic made five years after Gardels death, La Razn lauded the film for having avoided the sin of reproducing the trite and not very uplifting atmosphere of the tango. In effect, Carlos Gardel started out in the working-class suburbs, singing in grocery stores, as the film says. But the film did not go on to wallow in that torpid world of the bar counter and the suburban street tough [ese espeso ambiente del mostrador y del compadrito suburbano].35 Even though this reviewer acknowledged the rags-to-riches story that helped make Gardel a national icon, he complimented the film for avoiding any depiction of the gritty, urban milieu from which Gardel emerged. What the reviewer appreciated was the movies sanitized version of a popular-national legend. Critics like this one hoped that film, if it could avoid pandering to popular tastes, might serve as a vehicle for educating and improving the masses. They saw the cinema as an opportunity to align the nation with progress and modernity while preserving its distinctive essence. Argentine film companies largely agreed with the critics. Not content to cede middle- and upper-class moviegoers to Hollywood, the local studios aimed to improve the quality of their films in order to attract an audience who could afford higher admission prices. Frequently, this improvement involved an attempt to distance the cinema from lowbrow popular culture. As early as 1936, Argentina Sono Film hoped to enhance its image with Amalia (Moglia Barth), based not on a sainete but on the canonical novel by Jos Mrmol.36 The attempt to attract wealthier patrons also shaped the companys marketing strategy; Amalia debuted in the important Cine Monumental, and was then extended to 15 first-class movie houses before eventually being released simultaneously to 62 theaters throughout the barrios of Buenos Aires.37 Argentina Sono Film, in fact, sought to distinguish itself as a purveyor of healthy entertainment uncontaminated by the dubious morality of the tango.38 But the attempt to sanitize and elevate the content of films in order to attract a higherclass audience was commonplace across the industry. Pampa Film boasted of its own effort to improve the quality of Argentine cinema in its advertisements for La fuga (Saslavsky, 1937), a film that is honest and pure, that dignifies the Argentine screen in a clear attempt to improve itself artistically.39 Even Lumi35. La Razn, May 25, 1939, 15. 36. Di Nbila, La poca del oro, 13233. 37. Imparcialfilm, Aug. 5, 1936. 38. Ricardo Manetti, Argentina Sono Film: Ms estrellas que en el cielo, in Espaa, Cine argentino, 1:167. 39. La Prensa, July 28, 1937.

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ton, the studio most closely associated with lowbrow entertainment, employed the strategy. The companys As es la vida (Mgica, 1939) told the story of an upwardly mobile middle-class family. Although the film was based on a successful sainete, director Francisco Mgica purged the work of lowbrow elements, in particular the caricatured immigrants who were the sainetes most characteristic comic ploy.40 Mgicas efforts to lift Argentine cinema above its popular cultural roots were widely praised. In the pages of El Mundo, Calki lauded As es la vida for having transformed a sainete into a more respectable work of art: [I]ts sainete-like roughness has been refined, it has been cinematographically transformed, it has been given a higher level of comedy.41 For both commercial and aesthetic reasons, filmmakers shared the critics dream of a national cinema purged of the traces of disreputable popular culture. Despite this dream, films featuring the tango remained common throughout the 1930s. But even these movies were influenced by the industrys efforts at cultural improvement. During the silent era and for the first few years after the introduction of sound, director Jos Agustn Ferreyra produced sympathetic portraits of working-class urban life. A mulatto who grew up in a working-class family in Buenos Aires, Ferreyra drew heavily on the melodramatic conventions of the tango and the sainete. But it was their gritty realism that made his films stand out.42 However, Ferreyra soon found himself under increasing pressure to make more broadly commercial pictures. Between 1936 and 1938, he filmed three movies for the SIDE company starring theater actress and tango singer Libertad Lamarque. In these so-called tango operas, Ferreyra took advantage of Lamarques well-known voice by repeatedly interrupting the action so that she could sing tangos.43 While the directors commitment to the tango remained intact, he had abandoned the realist style of his early work. As Ferreyras biographer, Jorge Miguel Couselo, describes it, [T]he reality of a cinema with aspirations of industrialization was closing in on him.44
40. Nora Mazziotti, El costumbrismo en el cine: As es la vida, Todo Es Historia 390 (2000): 6667. 41. Cited in Mara Valdez, El reino de la comedia: Un terreno escurridizo y ambiguo, in Espaa, Cine argentino, 2:294. When it was awarded a municipal prize for best film, As es la vida became the first Argentine movie to receive official recognition. See Gabriela Fabbro, Lumiton: El berretn del cine, in Espaa, Cine argentino, 1:232; and Di Nbila, La poca de oro, 27778. 42. On Ferreyra, see Jorge Miguel Couselo, El Negro Ferreyra: Un cine por instinto (Buenos Aires: Freeland, 1969); Falicov, Argentine Cinema, 6669. 43. The term tango opera [pera tanguera] was coined by Di Nbila. See Di Nbila, La poca de oro, 135. 44. Couselo, El Negro Ferreyra, 76.

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This attempt to sanitize the Argentine cinema repeated a process that had already occurred in the United States, where the birth of the cinema had inspired significant efforts at moral uplift. From the 1920s on, Hollywood achieved enormous profits by manufacturing films that appealed to a multiclass audience. These films avoided threatening topics like class conflict and moved away from lowbrow genres such as the spectacular melodrama of early cinema.45 More fundamentally, classical Hollywood cinema elaborated strategies of narration that standardized reception, creating a new mode of spectatorship that blurred the class and ethnic divisions of movie audiences. But as Miriam Hansen has demonstrated, the new narrative strategies also produced the conditions for the emergence of alternative public spheres. Hollywood cinema appropriated earlier cultural traditions and popular entertainments as its raw material, depoliticizing them in the process. But this depoliticization was never total. Subordinate groups like women and working-class immigrants could, at times, find in the cinema a space from which to elaborate their own, autonomous points of view.46 Like the Hollywood studios, the Argentine film industry hoped to sanitize and elevate the popular culture that provided its primary source material. But in Argentina, the effort to render popular culture politically unthreatening was far less successful. Competition with Hollywood deepened the domestic cinemas reliance on popular culture. Filmmakers who sought to construct safe, morally uplifting representations of the nation needed to draw on the tango and the sainete in order to give these representations legitimacy. And even as they aimed to rise above their lowbrow cultural roots, they needed to hold onto their working-class audience. Argentine filmmakers walked a fine line, attempting to capitalize on the mass appeal of popular culture even as they pursued a more prosperous audience drawn to the technical and artistic elegance of Hollywood. As a result, the potential for alternative public spheres was much greater in the

45. On the various campaigns to clean up and moralize the cinema, see Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), 2295. On Hollywoods rejection of an explicitly workingclass cinema in favor of more conservative cross-class fantasies, see Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998), 17377. On the earlier working-class genre of spectacular melodrama, see Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contents (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2001). 46. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), esp. 60125.

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Argentine films of the period, in which subversive messages persisted alongside more conservative, moralizing, and sanitized ones. Caught between these two poles, the cinema failed to construct a coherent discourse about class or nation. Many of these films explored conservative themes such as upward mobility, the virtue of hard work, and the possibility of interclass marriage, yet they continually reproduced populist versions of Argentine national identity that reinscribed class divisions and suggested the futility of trying to overcome them. Argentine audiences of all classes continued to watch Hollywood movies in the 1930s, but domestic films offered a very different viewing experience; watching a local production, moviegoers were watching a representation of themselves.47 And despite the efforts of filmmakers and critics, these images of national identity retained the populist resonances inherent in earlier popular cultural practices.
The Hegemony of Melodrama

Melodrama, more than any other cultural form, shaped the formal language, plot lines and character types of early Argentine sound films. The centrality of melodrama was, in fact, overdetermined. Hollywood cinema itself was born with melodramatic predispositions, and given Hollywoods status as a model for imitation and competition, this orientation inevitably influenced Argentine filmmakers.48 But perhaps more important, melodramatic styles and stories dominated the local popular culture that contributed so much thematic content to Argentine films. Not only were melodramatic plots central to the tango and sainete; they were also disseminated in pulp fiction and the increasingly popular radio dramas of the day. These melodramatic narratives involved romantic conflicts that played out in a society characterized by a Manichean division between the noble poor and the evil rich. Although these narratives came in various forms, the archetype involved a poor, innocent girl who falls in love with a wealthy man. The popular weekly novels of the day featured prominently the bella pobre, the poor girl whose beauty might allow her to overcome societys prejudices and marry the man of her dreamstypically someone of far higher

47. Similarly, Carlos Monsivis has emphasized the importance of Mexican cinema for the formation of national identity; Monsivis, Notas sobre la cultura mexicana en el siglo XX, in Historia general de Mxico, vol. 4 (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mxico, 1976), 446. 48. On Hollywoods melodramatic predispositions, see Christine Gledhill, The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation, in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Womans Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 1987), 34.

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economic and social status. Similarly, tango songs constantly revisited the trope of the milonguita, the poor, innocent girl from the barrio who is seduced by a wealthy man and by the wild porteo nightlife. While some weekly novels had happy endings and others ended in tragedy, tango songs typically ended with the milonguita cruelly tossed aside and left to grow old alone.49 As filmmakers adapted local forms of popular culture to the screen, they relied so heavily on the generic conventions of Argentine melodrama that these conventions inform even those films that belong to other genres. Scholars have suggested that Argentinas popular melodrama spoke effectively to working-class concerns at a time when industrialization and internal migration were eroding traditional lifeways.50 More specifically, they have argued that the genre expressed working-class mens anxieties about womens growing presence in the workforce and in the world of public leisure.51 In these narratives, women are drawn into dangerous sexual attachments when they abandon their natural roles within the domestic bliss of the barrios and pursue dreams of upward mobility amid the bright lights of downtown. Tango lyrics, in particular, express a misogynistic desire to punish women for this transgression. In this context, scholars have depicted melodrama as essentially conservative. The genres narratives are structured by a profound fatalism, a sense that destiny controls ones future.52 They are, as Beatriz Sarlo has argued of the weekly novels, conformist texts, since they suggest that one can achieve happiness so long as one does not challenge the natural moral order. The milonguita, for example, can avoid her fate simply by staying home in the barrio. The bella pobre can be happy if she avoids romantic desires that challenge social rules.53
49. On romance fiction, see Beatriz Sarlo, El imperio de los sentimientos (1985; Buenos Aires: Norma, 2000). On the milonguitas of tango songs, see Diego Armus, Tango, Gender, and Tuberculosis in Buenos Aires, 19001940, in Disease in the History of Modern Latin America, ed. Diego Armus (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2003), 10129. Despite the omnipresence of melodrama, Argentine popular culture was not entirely homogenous. On the similarities and differences between tango, romance fiction, and the sainete, see Sarlo, El imperio de los sentimientos, 22225; Guy, Sex and Danger, 160; Eduardo P. Archetti, Masculinities: Football, Polo and the Tango in Argentina (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 15051. 50. Daniel James, Doa Maras Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000), 25360. Here James draws on the analysis of English melodrama in Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992). 51. This argument has been made most often for the case of the tango. See Guy, Sex and Danger, 14256; and Archetti, Masculinities, 12860. 52. On tango lyrics as essentially fatalistic, see Blas Matamoro, La ciudad del tango (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 1982), 117. 53. Sarlo, El imperio de los sentimientos, 17678.

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In short, melodramatic narratives discouraged any attempt to transform the social order. They eschewed any depiction of collective struggle and portrayed the division between rich and poor not as a class conflict but as an immutable, inevitable backdrop for individual stories of romance, transgression, punishment, and, occasionally, redemption. Thanks to the wholesale appropriation of melodramatic narratives by Argentine filmmakers, this conformism is visible in the movies of the 1930s. As Ricardo Manetti has demonstrated, Argentine film melodramas, no less than their counterparts in other national cinemas, feature female characters trapped by destiny, whose transgressions of patriarchal law are inevitably punished.54 Yet an exclusive emphasis on the conservatism of melodrama obscures other, equally important, messages. Since the 1970s, feminist film theorists have identified a radical ambiguity at the heart of melodramatic texts. While the rules of the genre require moral resolution in the form of the ultimate punishment of transgression, the aesthetic excess of melodramatic films and their success at eliciting identification with female victims enables and encourages alternative, and even subversive, readings. As Linda Williams puts it, speaking of the Holly wood melodramas of the 1930s, [T]he female hero often accepts a fate that the audience at least partially questions.55 In Argentina, the counterhegemonic potential of melodrama was exacerbated by its insistently classist orientation. First and foremost, Argentinas popular melodrama bequeathed to the local cinema a depiction of society as hopelessly divided into two classes: the idle, hypocritical, and amoral rich versus the hardworking, honest, and generous poor. In film after film, the dynamics of cinematic identification position the audience to sympathize with the poor and demonize the rich. As Domingo Di Nbila comments, the filmmakers of this era did not need to worry about developing

54. Ricardo Manetti, El melodrama, fuente de relatos, in Espaa, Cine argentino, 2:188269. 55. Linda Williams, Something Else Besides a Mother: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama, [1984] in Gledhill, Home Is Where the Heart Is, 320. On the radical ambiguity in melodrama, see Thomas Elsaesser, Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama, [1972] in ibid., 47. Feminist film theorists have emphasized the structural instability of melodrama, even if they have disagreed over the extent to which particular films enable readings that question patriarchal ideology. See, for example, E. Ann Kaplans more skeptical interpretation of Stella Dallas (Vidor, 1937) in Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (London: Routledge, 1992), 14979. Laura Podalsky has extended this sort of analysis to the Mexican revolutionary melodrama; Podalsky, Disjointed Frames: Melodrama, Nationalism, and Representation in 1940s Mexico, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 12 (1993): 5771.

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the characters of their villains: [I]t was sufficient that they be rich.56 In this context, it is not surprising that film critics worried about the cinemas tendency to recycle lowbrow popular culture. Melodramatic films were viscerally antielitist and thus potentially subversive. Typical of Argentine melodrama of the 1930s were the films of Libertad Lamarque, easily the genres biggest box-office attraction. First emerging as a major singing star on the radio, Lamarques movie career took off when she starred in Ferreyras tango operas. These early films established the basic pattern that Lamarque would follow throughout her long career.57 In almost every movie she made, Lamarque plays an innocent girl of humble origins, victimized by a society divided into the irreconcilable universes of the rich and the poor.58 In La ley que olvidaron (Ferreyra, 1938), for example, Lamarque plays Mara, a humble servant of a wealthy household who agrees to raise the love child of the familys spoiled daughter in order that the daughters honor might remain intact. Ferreyra establishes the fundamental class divide in the opening scene by juxtaposing images of the poor women of Maras barrio with the wealthy women at her workplace. Later, he emphasizes the same contrast by dissolving from a champagne bucket to a wash bucket. By positioning Lamarque at the lower end of this simple class divide, Ferreyra establishes her virtue and her likeability. Lamarques films, like so many Argentine movies in this period, encouraged viewers to identify with the working poor, an identification that could serve as the basis for a populist version of national identity. Among the specific variations of Lamarques archetypical role, one of the most common was that of the tango singer whose romance with a wealthy suitor is blocked by his elitist family. This plot recurs in such films as El alma del bandonen (Soffici, 1934), Besos brujos (Ferreyra, 1937), Puerta cerrada (Saslavsky, 1939), and Yo conoc a esa mujer (Borcosque, 1942). As Diana Paladino has pointed out, these films play on Lamarques popularity as a tango singer, as well as on the popularity of tango itself. Despite its widespread social acceptance by the 1930s, film melodramas continued to associate the tango with criminality and vice. In these films, Paladino remarks, the tango songstress was doomed from the start.59 Nevertheless, if melodramatic logic dictated that Lamarque be
56. Di Nbila, La poca de oro, 305. 57. The Argentine film industry followed the Hollywood model by constructing a star system, in which major actors were under exclusive contract to specific studios. This practice likely reinforced the tendency to stick with a winning formula. See Schnitman, The Argentine Film Industry, 86. 58. The phrase is Ricardo Manettis. Manetti, El melodrama, 264. 59. Diana Paladino, Libertad Lamarque, la reina de la lgrima, Archivos de la filmoteca 31 (Feb. 1999): 69.

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punished for the transgressive act of singing tango, surely that judgment was not shared by the members of the audience, many of whom were drawn to her early movies precisely because of her fame as a tango singer. In these films, tango functioned to locate the melodramatic victim on the noble and popular side of a simple class divide. But tango was not merely a popular musical genre; it was, by the 1930s, a powerful symbol of Argentine national identity. After all, it was largely by incorporating tango that Argentine filmmakers sought to differentiate their films from foreign imports. Playing the part of a tango singer, Lamarque represented her popular audience in terms of both class and national identity. For that audience, her victimization at the hands of snobbish elites could not be interpreted as a legitimate punishment for some real transgression, but only as classist persecution. In Puerta cerrada, Lamarque plays Nina Miranda, a singing star who sacrifices her career in order to marry a rich man whose family disapproves of her occupation. When her self-serving brother tricks her into believing that her husband has abandoned her, she decides to return to the stage in order to support her child. Briefly unsure about whether to challenge propriety by singing a tango, a song of the underworld [de bajo fondo], she turns to her brother. He reassures her, Decency doesnt mean singing a waltz instead of a tango. Thus heartened, she performs a stirring rendition of the classic La morocha, whose lyrics by ngel Villoldo emphasize the national authenticity of the performance: I am the Argentine brunette, the one who feels no sorrow, and spends her life happy with her songs. I am the gracious partner of the noble porteo gaucho, the one who reserves her affection for the man who owns her. I am the morocha of burning gaze, the one who feels the fire of love in her soul. I am the one whose love burns for the most honest and brave criollito. Soy la morocha argentina la que no siente pesares y alegre pasa la vida con sus cantares. Soy la gentil compaera del noble gaucho porteo, la que conserva el cario para su dueo. Yo soy la morocha de mirar ardiente, la que en su alma siente el fuego de amor. Soy la que al criollito ms noble y valiente ama con ardor.

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Although the lyrics underscore both the singers submissivenessher subordination to patriarchal authorityand her passionate sensuality, Ninas performance highlights the latter. The gaucho of the lyrics is not present on stage, and when Nina stops singing to execute a few tango steps, she treats her male partner as a prop. As she sings the final verse, the camera zooms in for a tight closeup. She smiles, seductively stretching out the first syllablesYo soy . . . and as the orchestra waits for her to continue, she inserts a spoken word that does not figure in the original lyric: pimpollo, literally flower bud or, in lunfardo, the popular slang of Buenos Aires, beautiful young woman.60 This scene, whose lighthearted sexiness contrasts markedly with the somber, melodramatic tone that characterizes the bulk of the film, harnesses Lamarques star power, enabling the audience to identify with Nina not simply as a passive melodramatic victim but as the proud bearer of an authentic and exciting popular culture. Ninas association with this particular version of the tango heightens the films critique of the hypocritical and moralistic elite whose disdain for the genre (along with her brothers selfishness) causes her downfall. Since Lamarques films displace class conflict from collective struggles over exploitation to individual battles over marriage choice, they can be considered conservative. In Silvia Orozs words, these films, like film melodramas throughout Latin America, point out social inequality, not in order to change it, but rather to humanize it.61 But melodramas truly subversive potential is realized when the pleasure and power of the transgression outweigh the ultimate moral resolution that upholds the dominant ideology. In Puerta cerrada, elite prejudice against the tango leads to a misunderstanding that results in the accidental death of Ninas husband and the wrongful incarceration of Nina herself. Given the strength of the audiences identification with Nina, in terms of both class and national identity, her punishment reads not only as personally unjust but also as an elitist attack on the Argentine people. Even in gender terms, her punishment is suspect. The ending of the film, in which Nina sacrifices herself in order to save her son, seems to uphold her husbands insistence that she give up her career in order to be a wife and mother. But it is difficult to believe an audience that had delighted in Libertad Lamarques performance of La morocha could have accepted this patriarchal lesson. Although Puerta cerrada was likely influenced by the Hollywood melodrama Stella Dallas (Vidor, 1937), the contrast between the films is instructive.62 In both,
60. http://lunfardo.pais-global.com.ar/index.php/2367. 61. Oroz, Melodrama, 171, italics in original. 62. Espaa, El modelo institucional: Formas de representacin en la edad de oro, in Espaa, Cine argentino, 1:134. On Stella Dallas, see the works cited in n. 55.

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the female protagonists frustrated dreams of upward mobility are eventually realized by the child that had been taken from her. But Stella Dallas spends much of the film striving ridiculously for upper-class status, and her downfall reads as punishment for this transgression. By contrast, Nina Miranda is never presented as an object of ridicule; she is punished merely for being a tango singer for representing, in other words, Argentine popular culture. Puerta cerrada was emblematic of Argentina Sono Films efforts to attract a higher-class audience for stars like Lamarque. Toward this end, director Luis Saslavsky replaced Ferreyras straightforward approach with a more intellectual and aesthetically innovative style.63 Yet, because it relied on melodrama and, in particular, on the popular associations of tango, even this sophisticated film enabled a subversive critique of patriarchal and antinationalist elitism. As Pascual Quinziano has demonstrated, melodramas pervasiveness within the cinema of the 1930s extended beyond genre boundaries, even exerting a powerful influence on the comedies of the day. Quinziano argues that Argentine film comedies represent an impure genre in which a melodramatic moralism always limits the potential for comic subversion.64 In this view, melodramas inevitable restoration of the moral order gives these films an essentially conservative cast. But while Quinziano is correct to emphasize the presence of melodramatic elements in the comedies of the 1930s, this impurity does not necessarily prevent the films from challenging the status quo. By appropriating melodramas Manichean vision of society, these comedies (like Lamarques films) compel identification with the poor and condemn the hypocrisy and meanspiritedness of the rich. Equally important, the comic elements in these movies often undermine the neat, moral resolutions offered by melodrama. This tension is particularly apparent in the films of Luis Sandrini, an accomplished circus performer and stage actor who became one of the most popular Argentine movie stars of the 1930s. Even more than Lamarque, Sandrini played the same character in virtually every film he madein his case, a somewhat Chaplinesque Everyman at once ridiculous and heroic.65 This characters ami63. Di Nbila, La poca de oro, 22932. Puerta cerrada was favorably reviewed by Mara Luisa Bombal in the prestigious intellectual journal Sur, an extremely unusual achievement for a locally produced film and one that suggests that Saslavskys efforts to elevate the popular melodrama were successful. Yet Bombal praised the film precisely for being true to the conventions of melodrama. Mara Luisa Bombal, Resea cinematogrfica de Puerta cerrada, in Obras completas (Santiago: Ed. Andrs Bello, 1996), 299302. 64. Pascual Quinziano, La comedia: Un gnero impuro, in Cine Argentino: La otra historia, ed. Sergio Wolf (Buenos Aires: Letra Buena, 1992), 12946. 65. Di Nbila, La poca de oro, 72. La Prensas reviewer commented on Sandrinis tendency to play the same role in every film: Are his devices the same, repeated from the old character in Los tres berretines? Certainly; La Prensa, Jan. 21, 1937, 16.

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able laziness and rejection of respectability stand outside the moral universe of melodrama and lend his films a subversive edge. Unlike Lamarques melodramas, Sandrinis comedies often foreground stories of rapid upward mobility, offering moviegoers the same rags-to-riches fantasy visible in Carlos Gardels cinematic biography. For example, Los tres berretines tells the story of a lower-middle-class family led by a Spanish immigrant shop owner. The film depicts the struggles of the shop owners three sons during the economic crisis of the early 1930s. One son is an unemployed architect whose financial difficulties are about to cost him his higher-class girlfriend. Meanwhile, the second son fantasizes about making it as a tango composer, despite his complete lack of musical education. In the end, the whole family is saved by the third son, who becomes a soccer star. He convinces the management of his club to hire his architect brother to design the new stadium, thereby rescuing the brother from poverty and allowing him to marry his girlfriend. Then the soccer player makes his other brothers dreams come true by giving him the money he needs to get his tango melody transcribed. Finally, he convinces his immigrant father of the beauty of soccer and thereby helps him assimilate into the Argentine nation.66 In its depiction of upward mobility, Los tres berretines seems to echo the discourse of the barrio associations and libraries that sprung up throughout Buenos Aires in the interwar period. Yet for these institutions, the path to selfimprovement lay in the acquisition of culture (with a capital C) and the performance of respectability, formality, and education.67 By contrast, the film repudiates this strategy, poking fun at the immigrants faith in hard work and his pursuit of middle-class respectability. In the climactic scene, the father, unable to get a seat in the sold-out stadium, climbs a telephone pole in order to watch his sons exploits on the soccer field. This carnivalesque image of the family patriarch, who had criticized his children for wasting their time on frivolous pursuits, underscores both the liberating potential of popular culture and the defeat of his old-fashioned notions of respectability. The critique of respectability, education, and playing by the rules is most clearly visible in the character of Eusebio, the would-be tango composer who spends his days hanging out in cafs, whistling his tango and looking for someone to transcribe it. Played by Sandrini, who is unmistakably the star of the film, Eusebio personifies mass

66. On the depiction of soccer in Los tres berretines, see Pablo Alabarces, Ftbol y patria: El ftbol y las narrativas de la nacin en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2002), 5763. 67. Gutirrez and Romero, Sectores populares, 91; Gonzlez, Lo propio y lo ajeno, 111.

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cultures promise of an escape from drudgery.68 Moreover, his success as a composer depends upon his embracing plebeian tastes: when he pays a caf poet to write lyrics for his tango, he rejects the first draft as too fancy and holds out for what the poet disdains as pedestrian verse. The rags-to-riches fantasy of Los tres berretines is essentially nonconformist; what speaks loudest is a sense of pride in the cultural practices of Argentinas lower classes. Sandrinis lazy but good-hearted simpleton appeared in film after film, but the characters subversive potential is most fully realized in Chingolo (Demare, 1940). Sandrini plays the title character, a hobo who makes a comic philosophy out of his refusal to work. Preferring to steal chickens, he and his two friends take offense when a rich man offers to pay them to change a flat tire. When he rescues the son of a wealthy family who had fallen into the river, Chingolo gets his chance to try life on the other side of the class divide. Chingolo reveals his essential moral rectitude when he refuses a monetary reward from the boys family: You dont charge for things like this. Impressed, the boys mother awards Chingolo the annual prize of the womens charity association she heads. Intent on transforming him into a respectable man [hombre de bien], she has him bathed and dressed up and then gets him an undemanding managerial job in her husbands peach cannery. At first Chingolo resists these changes because they offend both his anarchic spirit and his sense of morality. Speaking into the bosss dictation machine, he orders that the excess fruit be given to the poor rather than thrown outan act of goodwill his employer rejects on the grounds that keeping people hungry is part of business. Eventually, Chingolo is corrupted by his new surroundings. He has his friends pretend to get sick from a competitors peaches, thereby boosting his sponsors business and successfully currying favor. He then conceives of a laborsaving machine that will allow the boss to increase profits by firing workers. In the end, though, Chingolo repudiates the immorality of the rich, rejects his new life, and returns to his hobo ways. The catalyst of this moral reawakening comes from a subplot lifted directly from Argentine melodrama. Chingolo is enamored of Elvira, the nanny of the boy who nearly drowns at the beginning of the film. Unfortunately, she is in love with Eduardo, the familys eldest son, a typical nio bienthe spoiled, lazy, rich kid who is a stock character in Argentine cinema. Elvira, despite her poor romantic judgment, is the films most consistent

68. Sandrini played the role of Eusebio in the stage version of Los tres berretines. Sensing his star power, the filmmakers expanded his role when they adapted the script for the movie. Espaa, El modelo institucional, 41.

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moral voice. Impressed with Chingolos virtue at first, she scolds him for helping enrich the factory owner at the expense of poor workers. When Elvira gets pregnant and Eduardo and his parents refuse to recognize the child, Chingolo recovers his sense of morality. He offers to give the child his own last name in return for a small fortune, which he then gives to Elvira so that she can pay for the childs education. This act returns Chingolo to the virtuous side of the class divide, but it does not get him the girl. Eduardo, inspired by Chingolos example, comes to his senses, asks for Elviras forgiveness, and promises to marry her and recognize the child. In the last scene, Chingolo and his friends hop a train; he misses Elvira but is happy to have returned to the life of a hobo. Chingolos ending dilutes the movies subversive message. Not only is Chingolo content with life on the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, but the interclass marriage of Eduardo and Elvira presents a hopeful model of class reconciliation, implying that the fundamental class divide depicted throughout the film can, in fact, be bridged. In this sense, Chingolo seems to substantiate Quinzianos argument that melodramatic elements work to undermine the subversive potential of comedy. Yet, the films ending feels false. Eduardo is a one-dimensional character whose last-minute conversion is implausible, to say the least. Moreover, class reconciliation and the restoration of moral order is only possible at the level of subplot. Chingolo cannot be incorporated into the dominant Argentine society, and his critique of hypocrisy, capitalist exploitation, and inequality remains uncontested. While Sandrinis films adopt melodramas vision of society as hopelessly divided between good and evil, poor and rich, they do not embrace melodramas moralism. On the contrary, Sandrinis character represents an alternative morality, within which the solidarity between poor people is a much more important value than either hard work or obeying the law.69 Chingolos essential moral goodness derives from his rejection of capitalist greed and is not threatened by his tendency to steal wallets from rich people, to dine on stolen chickens, or to refuse work. In the end, he confirms his morality through an act of selfless generosity toward a fellow poor person.70 By compelling audience identification with Sandrinis character, Chingolo poses a critique of the dominant moral code. Yet the films ending imposes a

69. La Nacins film reviewer certainly saw Chingolo as a popular alternative to the dominant moral code: [I]n this character of contradictory moral profile, [Sandrini] mines his particular vein of popular comedy with ease; La Nacin, Sept. 19, 1940, 15. 70. As Mara Valdez points out, Sandrinis image as a good guy from the barrio, always willing to take a risk for a friend, is central to all his film characters. Valdez, Luis Sandrini, in Espaa, Cine argentino, 1:45.

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conformist, melodramatic resolution. This ambiguity reflects the conflicting commercial pressures faced by the Argentine film industry. Even as it attempted to attract higher-class moviegoers, the industry needed to hold onto its popular audience. Since Sandrinis enormous popular appeal was inseparable from the subversive implications of his character, those implications persisted in his movies alongside more conservative, conventionally moralistic messages. Moreover, like the films of Libertad Lamarque, these impure comedies reveal the subversive potential of melodrama itself. The ability of audiences to identify with the characters depicted by Lamarque and Sandrini depended upon their being firmly situated on the economically inferior but morally superior side of the class divide. In other words, for all its fatalism, Argentine melodrama demanded a certain class consciousness on the part of viewers.
Can Love Heal the Nation?

U.S. film historians have emphasized Hollywoods capacity to generate national myths capable of unifying society across class and ethnic divisions. Lary May, for example, has argued that all the major film genres of the 1930s celebrated an ethos of interpenetrating opposites. According to May, Hollywood protagonists in this era combined the integrity of the heroic citizen with the traits of previously marginal characters like the fallen woman, the comic, and the gangster. In this way, these films imagined a more inclusive, pluralistic, and just nation, providing a language for a new national consensus even before the New Deal began to make it a reality.71 Not all historians agree with Mays assessment of the progressive character of 1930s Hollywood, but most do call attention to Hollywoods capacity for national mythmaking. Robert Sklar, for example, argues that in the context of the Depression and the rise of Nazism, American filmmakers saw the necessity, almost as a patriotic duty, to revitalize and refashion a cultural mythology. In Sklars account, filmmakers like Frank Capra and Walt Disney avoided any critique of American society in favor of national myths that audiences could easily embrace.72 Hollywoods new
71. Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000), 5599. 72. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (1975; New York: Vintage, 1994), 195214, quote on 196. For another account that emphasizes the conservatism of U.S. mass culture in the 1930s, see Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 150211. Lawrence Levine has described 1930s films as conservative on their surface but has emphasized the extent to which audiences could make their own meanings out of mass

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national mythos, whether essentially progressive or conservative, was not easily transposable to the Argentine context. A look at the comic films of Manuel Romero, perhaps the most prolific and commercially successful Argentine director and screenwriter of the 1930s, reveals that despite extensive Hollywood influence, the Argentine cinema was unable to produce such unifying national myths.73 After a long career in the popular theater, Romero became the principal director for Lumiton studios, where he produced lighthearted, formulaic comedies with alacrity. Between March 1937 and March 1938, for example, six new Romero films were released in Buenos Aires.74 Romeros background as a director of musical variety shows and as a prolific tango lyricist enabled him to make movies that appealed to popular tastes, but it also aroused the concern of those who sought to elevate and improve the Argentine cinema. In fact, his films often provoked exasperation among critics, who were dismayed by the immense popularity of what they considered a lowbrow cinematic style. In a review of the film Gente bien (1939), La Razns critic could not hide his condescension as he congratulated Romero for attracting the masses to Argentine cinema: A few days ago, we referred to the position of Mr. Romero in our cinematographic media in order to recognize his contribution to our local film industry, as an interpreter of the simple tastes of the masses that attend these homegrown productions. . . . [W]e do not believe that Mr. Romero has tried to do anything other than to reach his audience directly, using elements of simple melodrama, in order to tip the balance in favor of the humble masses.75 That Romero should have provoked such ambivalence among critics anxious to celebrate the national film

culture. See Levine, The Folklore of Industrial Society. For an account that emphasizes both the progressive and conservative elements in the Hollywood films of the 1930 s, see Gary Gerstles discussion of Frank Capra in American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), 17075. 73. On Romeros film career, see Andrs Insaurralde, Manuel Romero (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de Amrica Latina, 1994); and Fortunato Mallimacci and Irene Marrone, eds., Cine e imaginario social (Buenos Aires: Univ. de Buenos Aires, 1997). 74. Di Nbila, La poca de oro, 185. 75. La Razn, June 29, 1939, 13. Romeros films repeatedly inspired this sort of critical condescension. In El Mundo, Calki summed up his review of Gente bien as follows: A simple show, using straightforward devices, with an eye to the broader popular sector; El Mundo, June 29, 1939, 17. Reviewing another Romero film, La vuelta de Rocha, La Prensa echoed this elitism: Perhaps, with an eye to the popular, it carries the plot across vulgar terrain and plays tasteless notes. . . . In popular theaters, precisely for these related factors, its success is assured; La Prensa, Sept. 9, 1937, 16.

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industrys progress is, at first blush, paradoxical. As Claudio Espaa has demonstrated, Romeros films typically use happy endings to advance a comforting message of class reconciliation.76 Yet, as La Razns reviewer made clear, the problem with Romero had to do with his use of melodrama: not only did the director pander to the simple tastes of the masses, but he did so with melodramatic plot elements that championed the poor and denigrated the rich. As in other Argentine comedies, these melodramatic elements encouraged subversive readings alongside the more conformist ones suggested by the films happy endings. Romeros comedies depict the working poor as a dignified, respectable community held together by strong bonds of solidarity and defined in contrast to the rich. Typically, these films describe this contrast as a question of national identity. That is, the opposition between rich and poor is articulated as an opposition between foreign and national. Romeros movies construct a particular version of the Argentine nation, one that emphasizes conventional morality and conservative values like hard work but that also contains a deeply populist message, insofar as it is premised on the exclusion of the rich. The protagonist of Gente bien is Elvira, yet another poor girl who is seduced, impregnated, and abandoned by a selfish aristocrat. She is rescued by a group of musicians who give her a home; since societys prejudice against single mothers prevents her from finding work, they even hire her as a singer. When a judge awards Elviras child to the wealthy father, the musicians devise a complex scheme that succeeds in restoring the child to Elvira and incorporating her definitively into their community. Gente bien offers a stark contrast between the hateful rich and the noble poor and locates national authenticity on the side of the poor: the musicians prefer to play tangos, but these days the wealthy revelers they play for would rather do gringo dances like the fox-trot. It is a theme to which Romero returned often. In the nostalgic Los muchachos de antes no usaban gomina (1937), the heyday of tango at the turn of the century is contrasted with the Buenos Aires of the 1930s, in which the corrupting influence of North American culture has infected high society: Here, even the bandoneones [the prototypical tango instrument] play in English. Romeros films thus make explicit what is implied in so many other films of the period: the poor are not only exemplars of dignity and moral virtue but are also the true bearers of Argentine national identity. In this context, films that tell interclass love stories are particularly interesting. Like the nineteenth-century foundational fictions analyzed by Doris
76. Espaa, Los muchachos de antes no usaban gomina, in Espaa, Cine argentino, 1:229.

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Sommer, these films can be read as national romances, efforts to overcome societys divisions by forging a new national family.77 Many of Romeros comedies include the old melodramatic plot line of the poor girl in love with a wealthy man. But with the release of La rubia del camino in 1938, Romero inaugurated a very successful series of films that reversed the typical gender roles of the interclass romance. Starring Paulina Singermann as a rich young woman who falls in love with a humble working-class man, these films invariably end happily when love and marriage conquer class prejudice. La rubia del camino was clearly modeled on Frank Capras 1934 Oscar-winner, It Happened One Night.78 In both films, a pampered rich girl chafes under her fathers attempt to control her choice of spouse. She runs away from the familys vacation spot, meets a man of distinctly lower social standing, and travels with him to the big city. They experience a series of adventures and eventually fall in love. When they arrive in the city, their union is threatened, but in the end, love overcomes all obstacles. Despite these similarities, however, Romeros film is not merely a remake with little bits of local color added. On the contrary, La rubia del camino breaks with its Hollywood precursor by setting Capras fantasy of interclass romance within the melodramatic universe typical of the Argentine cinema of the period. One of the earliest screwball comedies, It Happened One Night promotes the ideal of a classless society. As Kristine Karnick and Henry Jenkins have argued, screwball comedies explicitly posit work and the work ethic as preferable to a class-based system of inherited wealth, power and status.79 In these films, the fantasy of interclass romance suggests that class divisions can be overcome, so long as both rich and poor are willing to sacrifice; the rich

77. Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991). Of course, Birth of a Nation (Griffith, 1915) is the paradigmatic case of a cinematic national romance. 78. That It Happened One Night provided the inspiration for La rubia del camino is a matter of scholarly consensus. See, for example, Di Nbila, La poca de oro, 19092; Insaurralde, Manuel Romero, 24; Valdez, El reino de la comedia, 28687. Contemporary critics frequently cited the Hollywood influences visible in Romeros films. As La Nacin commented in its review of Mujeres que trabajan, The moviegoer will recognize . . . the setting, the essence, and even the details of foreign films; La Nacin, July 7, 1938, 14. 79. Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins, Introduction: Comedy and the Social World, in Classical Hollywood Comedy, ed. Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 1995), 277. See also Brunovska Karnick, Comedy and Reaffirmation in Hollywood Romantic Comedy, in ibid., 12346. Although Robert Sklar argues that It Happened One Night ought not to be considered a screwball comedy, most film critics do apply that label. Sklar, Movie-Made America, 207.

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protagonist must give up her life of privilege in order to struggle alongside the working-class hero, while the working-class character must relinquish his single-minded pursuit of career advancement in order to seek happiness. At the end of It Happened One Night, heiress Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) runs out on her lavish wedding to a wealthy playboy in order to begin a far less luxurious life with newspaperman Peter Warne (Clark Gable). Peters initial interest in Ellie is purely opportunistic. Having recently lost his job, the wisecracking reporter offers to help her get to New York in exchange for an exclusive. In the end, though, he also makes a sacrifice: he gives up the scoop in order to get the girl. In this way, screwball comedies exemplify Mays ethos of interpenetrating opposites. Successful romance requires that both partners learn from each other in order to form a union of complementary opposites that models successful national unification.80 By contrast, La rubia del camino, with its roots in Argentine popular melodrama, presupposes an unbridgeable moral chasm between rich and poor. As a result, the Argentine version offers a far less convincing message about the prospects for class reconciliation. In the world of La rubia del camino, the gap between social classes is far bigger and class resentments far more intractable than they are in It Happened One Night. The Argentine film opens with Singermanns character, Betty, being rude to her servants, playing golf, and snobbishly insulting la chusma [the rabble]. Later, when her grandfather instructs her that life is about struggle, she protests: But Im rich! I dont have any reason to work, or to struggle, or to suffer. Capras film does poke fun at Ellie for her sense of entitlement, but it stops short of depicting her as a snob. The contrast between the male protagonists of the two films is even starker. In Romeros film, Betty encounters not a self-interested reporter, but a simple truck driver, Julin, whose offer to help is purely altruistic, if a bit paternalistic: he is worried about the harm that may befall a woman traveling alone to Buenos Aires. Romeros character is both more clearly working class and more class conscious; while Peter pokes fun at Ellie for being spoiled and sheltered, Julin goes further, explicitly denouncing the rich in several scenes. In both films, the rich girl initially despises the male lead, but in Ellies case, this disdain is at least partly justified by Peters boorishness. Betty, by contrast, ridicules Julin for his cheap cigarettes and his pedestrian taste in music.
80. For the idea of couple formation in the screwballs as a union of complementary opposites, see Tina Olsin Lent, Romantic Love and Friendship: The Redefinition of Gender Relations in Screwball Comedy, in Karnick and Jenkins, Classical Hollywood Comedy, 31431.

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Not only is the economic and cultural chasm that separates Betty and Julin deeper, but so too is the disparity between their moral characters. Whereas neither Ellie nor Peter begins the film as paragons of virtue, Betty and Julin reflect the morally polarized conception of class that is common to almost all Argentine movies of this period: the hateful rich versus the noble poor.81 La rubia del camino also makes a clearer connection between class and national identity. In It Happened One Night, Peter teaches Ellie a series of comic lessons about popular culture: how to properly dunk a doughnut, how to give a piggyback ride, how to hitchhike. In adapting this plot element, Romero transforms it. Instead of doughnut dunking, Julin teaches Betty how to make mate, the popular tea. Unlike doughnuts, mate is an instantly legible symbol of national identity, associated with Argentinas rural past and with the gaucho. A lesson in mate preparation is a lesson in argentinidad. Peters mock seriousness about the art of doughnut-dunking is meant to poke fun at Ellie for being out of touch with the culture of ordinary people, and she understands that she is being teased. By contrast, Julins analysis of mate symbolismthe bitter tea and the sweet sugar represent the two sides of lifeis a sincere lesson in folk wisdom; there is no joke to get. The question of Argentine national identity appears in the film in other ways as well. Betty is not simply rich; her foreign nickname implies a lack of national authenticity.82 She explains her ignorance about mate by noting that she was educated in Europe. Julin, by contrast, is unimpeachably Argentine; he rejects the name Betty and insists on calling her instead by her real name, Isabel. To the oppositions between rich and poor and between foreign and national, La rubia del camino adds two more, both of which are absent in Capras film: urban versus rural and modern versus traditional. Drawing on a long-standing trope in Argentine culture, the film associates Buenos Aires with a modernizing elite caught up in slavish imitation of Europe. Betty, at home in the big city and a fish out of water in the country, is repeatedly described as a modern and frivolous girl. By contrast, the rural interior of the country, represented by Julin, is the locus of Argentine tradition. Within the logic of the film, class and geography are more important credentials for membership in the

81. Mara Valdez has noted that La rubia del camino differs from its Hollywood model in that the repartee is entirely one-sided; Julin, unlike Peter, does not participate in the wisecracking; Valdez, El reino de la comedia, 287. Clearly, Julins seriousness results from the melodramatic logic of the film: as the embodiment of the poor, he is a study in nobility and dignity, not a character who is particularly apt to express sarcasm or lighthearted humor. 82. Singermanns blonde hairunderscored in the films titlealso signals her foreignness.

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nation than even ethnicity. On their trip through the countryside, the couple stops in on some old friends of Julin, including an Italian immigrant and his family. Their rural poverty places them comfortably within the films imagined community, despite their immigrant status. Given that Betty begins La rubia del camino as the embodiment of a despicable elite, the films happy resolution requires her to experience a profound transformation. She must unlearn her class prejudice, adopt the values of solidarity and generosity associated with the poor, and, in fact, embrace her Argentine identity. Her transformation from modern and frivolous girl to noble Argentine woman and worthy spouse for Julin is heavily gendered. In It Happened One Night, Ellies femininity is both maternal and sexual: in one scene she is moved by the sight of an impoverished child, and in another she successfully hitches a ride by revealing her legs to passing motorists. La rubia del camino is quite tame by comparison; it is Bettys maternal instinct alone that gives rise to her transformation.83 When the couple arrives at the home of Julins Italian friends, the wife is about to give birth without the benefit of medical attention. The previously useless and selfish Betty rises to the occasion, overseeing the delivery and teaching the men the proper way to swaddle a baby. Not only does this scene force Julin to revise his view of Bettyit actually precipitates her transformation. In the very next scene, she has suddenly lost her condescending attitude toward the popular music on the radio. When they get a flat tire, she offers to help change it, and when Julin is hungry, she offers him salamines y pan [sausages and bread], just the sort of working-class meal she had earlier disdained. The emergence of Bettys femininityher nurturing, maternal instinctallows her to overcome her shallow arrogance and embrace the music and food of the Argentine masses. Gender trumps class, enabling Betty to join the national community. Bettys sudden transformation into a mother figure betrays the films debt to the moral code of melodrama, within which a more assertive, sexual femininity is transgressive and invariably punished. The nature of her transformation reveals what exactly is wrong with people like Betty: their wealth has corrupted them, perverting their essential (gendered) humanity. In an inversion of George Bernard Shaws Pygmalion, Romero posits that the rich

83. The recurring joke in It Happened One Night, in which Peter erects the walls of Jerichoa blanket hung on a stringbetween his bed and Ellies, has no counterpart in La rubia del camino, which shies away from this sort of erotic tease. This prudishness likely had multiple causes, but it follows logically from the identification of Julin, and poor people more generally, as the essence of moral rectitude.

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woman can only discover her true self when she sheds the cultural baggage of wealth under the tutelage of a poor man. Romero breaks most decisively from Capras model in the final portion of the film. In It Happened One Night, a simple misunderstanding threatens to keep Peter and Ellie apart, but once the confusion is sorted out, nothing stands in the way of their marriage. In La rubia del camino, by contrast, class difference remains a powerful obstacle to the union of Betty and Julin. Upon their arrival in Buenos Aires, Betty quickly embarks on an effort to integrate Julin into Buenos Aires high society, buying him fancy clothes and even getting him a manicure. Now it is Julin who is a fish out of water, and he recoils at being treated like a doll. They begin to drift apart, until Julin storms out of town when he suspects Betty of having reunited with her former fianc. The happy ending is in doubt until Julin drives up to his Italian friends house and out walks Betty, holding the baby. At this point, hundreds of miles from Buenos Aires and with Bettys maternal instinct restored, the couples union is definitive. Betty makes interclass romance possible by choosing the authentic Argentine world of the rural poor over the Europeanized, wealthy society of Buenos Aires. La rubia del camino betrays a striking ambivalence about modernity. It is the independence of the modern girl that drives the films plot and enables Bettys transformation. Only by rebelling against her fathers authority is she able to escape the morally depraved world of the rich and cross the class line. Romero, in fact, distinguished himself among Argentine filmmakers for his tendency to portray independent women in a positive light.84 One imagines that the women who flocked to these movies would have enjoyed Bettys willingness to stand up to her father. Nevertheless, the films denouement reinscribes an explicitly antimodern patriarchy. The reconciliation of Betty and Julin requires not only that she reject her elite, urban lifestyle but also that she take on the subordinate, feminine role in the couple. In this sense, the movie shares a common gender dynamic with Capras film: in both, the capricious, independent woman is eventually subordinated to the man. But in the melodramatic universe of the Argentine film, this gendered plot line reinforces the triumph of Argentine national identity over foreignness, of the rural over the urban, of the poor over the rich, as well as of tradition over modernity. Betty replaces her father with an even more traditional patriarch, one who presumably will be able to dominate her more effectively. La rubia del camino, thus, tries to have it both ways, celebrating
84. Romeros celebration of working women is most explicit in Mujeres que trabajan (1938). The contrast with Lamarques films is striking. In both Besos brujos and Puerta cerrada, Lamarque promises to give up her artistic career upon marriage.

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the modern woman as the agent of an essentially antimodern transformation to national authenticity. As an interclass national romance, La rubia del camino is similarly problematic. Unlike in the Hollywood screwball, the formation of the couple does not entail a union of complementary opposites. On the contrary, while Julin nobly resists Bettys efforts to change him, Betty must forsake her previous life and be reborn as Isabel. This reincarnation is even more explicit in Isabelita (Romero, 1940), the follow-up to La rubia del camino. In this film, Singermann again plays a wealthy heiress who falls in love with a paragon of working-class virtuein this case, a tango singer. Because he despises the rich, she conceals her true identity from him, calling herself Isabel instead of her much fancier real name, Alcida. In the films climactic wedding scene, after all obstacles to their interclass marriage have been overcome, Singermann embraces her new identity as Isabel, declaring, Alcida is dead. While these films hold out hope for the transformation of rich people, they also suggest that the only Argentina worth building is the one associated with the poor. In this sense, the happy endings in Singermanns movies are as unconvincing as Chingolos: only the miraculous transformationeven the metaphorical deathof a rich individual makes interclass romance possible. Set in the melodramatic world of binary oppositions, the formation of the couple reads less as class reconciliation than as the victory of the poor over the rich. National romance can only be forged, these films suggest, through the negation of elite culture. As Bettynow Isabeldrives off with Julin at the end of La rubia del camino, they have not forged a new nation. Rather, Betty has joined an already-existing national community, one that for all its solidarity, morality, and authenticity remains locked in poverty and antimodern stasis. Romeros conservative vision of an Argentina defined by tradition, patriarchy, and the virtue of hard work coexists uneasily with his populist condemnation of the other Argentina, a country dominated by a superficial, selfish, Europeanizing elite. As a result, La rubia del camino is unable to generate the sort of unifying national myth produced by It Happened One Night and other Hollywood movies of the period. The contradictory messages of films like La rubia del camino reflected both commercial pressures and discursive constraints. Facing competition from the powerful Hollywood studios, Argentine filmmakers pursued a higher-class audience by sanitizing lowbrow cultural material and by embracing conservative messages. The films happy endings, their insistence on the virtue of hard work, their hopeful optimism about the possibility of transforming the richall actively discouraged any overt challenge to the status quo. Nevertheless, in order to differentiate their products from Hollywood movies and

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to guarantee a mass audience, the domestic film industry borrowed heavily from popular culture, particularly the melodramatic tradition embodied in the sainete and the tango. This tradition was itself ambivalent, encouraging conservative fatalism even as it constructed an essential opposition between the hypocritical, hateful rich and the noble, generous poor. As a result, the cinemas conservative, conformist messages came inscribed within a populist discourse that posited a subversive antielitism. The scathing depictions of the antinational elite in Lamarques films, Sandrinis rejection of inequality and exploitation and his liberating refusal to submit to work discipline, Romeros insistence that only the poor could represent the nationall of these constituted powerful critiques of Argentine society. Far from unifying the nation across class lines, Argentine cinema reinscribed class divisions at every turn and thus failed to reproduce Hollywoods success in national mythmaking. Although a more definitive assessment of audience reception awaits further research, my analysis does enable some tentative conclusions about the impact of domestic films on popular culture and consciousness. The rags-to-riches fantasies in films like La vida de Carlos Gardel and Los tres berretines may well have reinforced the message of the barrio associations and advertisements that encouraged the pursuit of upward mobility. More generally, by disseminating images of national identity to a mass audience, the Argentine cinema promoted national integration. Yet these versions of Argentine identity were insistently polarizing. Watching these films, audiences learned to imagine their nation in a way that rejected the selfishness of the modernizing elite and celebrated the dignified solidarity of the poor. In this way, the Argentine cinema of the 1930s generated discursive elements that would serve as important building blocks for the populist political appeals of the mid-1940s. As Daniel James has recently suggested, the rhetoric of Manichean oppositions so crucial to Peronisms political appeal reflects the influence of popular melodrama.85 From this perspective, the political achievement of Juan and Eva Pern was to appropriate the populist elements that circulated in Argentine mass culture and redeploy them in a way that served their project. While preserving the fundamental distinction between the hypocritical, antinational rich and the dignified, authentic poor, Peronism employed a nationalist discourse about industrialization to rearticulate modernity and the working class. Likewise, it embraced the celebrated virtue of solidarity, so central to the depiction of the poor in the films of the 1930s, and used it to promote a new, collective form of upward mobiliy.

85. James, Doa Maras Story, 255.