La mujer del puerto (1934)

La mujer del puerto: Directed by Arcady Boytler, Raphael J. Sevilla. With Andrea Palma, Domingo Soler, Francisco Zárraga, Joaquín Busquets. Rosario (Palma) becomes a prostitute after losing her father and discovering her boyfriend had a liaison with another woman. In Veracruz, Rosario lives above a sordid cabaret “selling her love to the men coming from the sea.” One night, sailor Alberto (Soler) rescues Rosario from the dirty hands of a drunk man. They get along and go to Rosario’s room. After making love, they begin to talk and Rosario discovers they’re siblings…

“From the very start, this movie is filled with striking cinematography, sharply drawn characters, and the promise of melodramatic riches, but it also exhibits a disconcerting lack of narrative drive. u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThings happen, of course, and they surely must seem earthshaking to the characters involved (although the heroine seems a decade too old to be quite so naive about her cad of a boyfriend). But thereu0026#39;s hardly any sense of dramatic tension, much less urgency. Indeed, the movie seems almost like an anthropological documentary, in which the camera spends much of its time dispassionately observing the behavior of ordinary folks at work and play, with little indication that the story is going anywhere in particular.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eAnd then, with only minutes of running time to spare, out of the clear blue sky comes the (absurdly far-fetched) revelation that seals the protagonistu0026#39;s tragic fate.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThere is much of interest here for students of film, or of the period of the Thirties, or of the movieu0026#39;s settings of town and port in Mexico. Thereu0026#39;s little psychological depth, though, and the most intriguing question about this u0026quot;iconicu0026quot; representative of the u0026quot;film of sinnersu0026quot; genre is, What (aside from the boob shot) made such a seemingly dull story so compelling for the filmgoing public of its day?”