Sombra verde

"Sombra verde" certainly starts off with a bang. Ricardo Montalbán plays a Mexican businessman taking a jungle trek to scout locations for a milling operation. When his inexperienced guide reveals they're totally lost, things get desperate quickly. The manful Montalbán is quite strong in these harrowing scenes, doing his best to keep his humanity in a rapidly deteriorating situation. In addition to being a good actor, he looks absolutely amazing. With his broad shoulders and pectorals etched in marble, he's truly a sight for sore eyes.

Things really go off the rails in the film's the second half, a romantic melodrama presumably inspired by "The Tempest." Ariadne Welter plays a free-spirited girl who's spent her entire life in a small jungle compound, but she somehow sports an ultra-fashionable 1950s Italian-style haircut and a slinky party dress. The romantic scenes were a total dud for me, and I found Welter's childlike dialogue and naiveté off-putting. There are also a few shots of animal cruelty, as mules are depicted struggling rushing against fierce river tides. It's hard to recommend this one plainly.

"Sombra verde" is another little gem by underrated Mexican director Roberto Gavaldón. Shot almost entirely in open spaces, the melodrama is an adaptation of the 1949 novel of the same name by Mexican writer Ramiro Torres Septién. It tells the story of scientist Federico Garzón who is sent by a pharmaceutical company to investigate the possibility of exploiting barbasco in the jungle of Veracruz, to produce cortisone from its roots. But Federico and his guide Pedro get lost, and when the scientist is the only survivor in the middle of the jungle, he finds a remote farm by a waterfall called Paraíso (Paradise). The owner tries to kill him, but his young daughter Yáscara falls for the stranger. Gavaldón, who usually wrote the script with his collaborators, created magnificent images, as the opening shots of a popular fair; the sequence when vultures fly low, surrounding Federico on horse, as he carries the corpse of Pedro on another animal; or all the intensely erotic scenes involving young, beautiful and lovely Ariadne Welter as Yáscara. There was no Hays code ruling the Mexican film industry nor the Catholic fanaticism of Franco's Spain to deprive the relation of sensuality and to suggest a chaste friendship instead: it is obvious that Yáscara knows everything about mating, as it is she who asks Federico to be her man, and whenever they start romancing, there is no denial of the intense foreplay… the camera looks somewhere else with complicity. Handsome and well-built Ricardo Montalbán returned to the film industry of his home country, taking a brief and healthy rest from Esther Williams' swimming pool romantic vehicles and other silly Hollywood mishmash. Víctor Parra's solid enactment of Yáscara's father; Jorge Martínez de Hoyos' award-winning performance as Pedro, Antonio Díaz Conde's score and Alex Phillips' monochromatic cinematography, are all assets in this fine production.

As another poster suggested, this movie is a bit schizophrenic. The very good first half has Ricardo Montalban as a pharmaceutical company representative arriving in a regional town during a vividly captured festival in order to journey into the jungle, where he can secure rights to a substance found important to new medications. But as the festival means all local hotel rooms are booked, a local guide persuades him to go directly into the jungle. The trouble is, this man has exaggerated his familiarity with the jungle, which is full of discomforts and perils. They're soon lost, then in much worse trouble. Montalban is alone by the time he finally stumbles upon other people--which itself nearly proves fatal. Wounded but taken in after all, he is tended in part by the settlement padrone's daughter, who naturally is gaga over this strapping stranger. For his part, he isn't greatly paused by the fact that he's got a wife waiting for him to return to "civilization."

This section feels less inspired, succumbing to familiar "forbidden passions in the forbidding jungle" stuff. It doesn't help that the actress is naturally much too glam for her circumstances, yet at the same time rather shrill and neurotic rather than the ethereal Rima The Bird Girl type that the filmmakers might have had in mind. It's also problematic that her father only looks about ten years her senior (which was exactly the case, in terms of the actors' ages), and that as written Montalban's character isn't terribly sympathetic by current standards. He goes from being a belligerent barker or orders to a self-justifying marital cheat, and frankly the film does not come up with a transporting enough atmosphere to pull its melodrama off without getting somewhat clunky. Still, the ending is more graceful than one expects, and the movie as a whole is well-made. It's worth a look, although if it were a Hollywood film of the same period, it would be considered just a slightly-above-average "B" programmer.