Nosotros los pobres

'We the Poor' is a somewhat overwrought drama by Ismael Rodríguez, a Mexican director whose films often deal with social injustice and economic hardship.

The hero of this story is José, nicknamed 'Pepe the Bull', although he looks more like Keenan Wynn than any sort of livestock. Pepe is a Mexican working stiff: the sole support of his family, including his young daughter Chachita and his paralysed mother, who can't speak or move but who can roll her eyes. Ay caramba, can this woman roll her eyes!

Pepe works hard, but the family are just barely getting by. (They live in what appears to be a slum neighbourhood, although it's extremely clean.) One day the caretaker walks in and helps himself to the rent money, which Pepe has stashed in a hole in the wall behind a photograph. The only witness to the theft is Pepe's mother. Being paralytic, she can't cry out during the robbery, and afterwards she can't tell Pepe who stole the money. But she sure can roll her eyes, while the camera zooms in for a close-up. (It utterly beggars belief that Pepe and Chachita haven't worked out some means of communication with his mother, such as teaching her to blink in Morse code. Even the Bowery Boys were able to figure out that one.)

Now Pepe can't pay the rent, and pretty soon along comes a Mexican rent-collector (Sancho the Bailiff?) to evict his family. There's a truly ludicrous scene in which the removal men take away *every* ornament and stick of furniture from Pepe's house. Then they come back and dump his mother on the floor, so they can take her wheelchair. They put the wheelchair in the lorry, then they come back again and take Chachita's doll. Buenos hombres! Meanwhile, Pepe is in el juzgado ('the hoosegow') because he's been framed for someone else's crime.

Despite the soap-opera plot line and some very obtrusive background music, there's much in this film that impressed me. There's an excellent montage sequence, in which the caretaker is plagued by guilt for his theft. (But not enough to give back the money.) He keeps seeing pairs of circular objects (two brass hoops in a bedframe, two saucepans on the wall) and imagining them as Pepe's mother's eyes, staring at him remorselessly. One montage shot in this sequence seems to have been inspired by a similar shot in Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis'. (Always steal from the best.)

Some of the frame compositions in the prison sequences are extremely impressive. I started to laugh at the striped uniforms on the prison inmates, which reminded me of pyjamas, or the striped clothes worn by convicts in old Three Stooges movies. But apparently prison inmates in Mexico in the 1940s did indeed wear such uniforms. I had some trouble following the dialogue: many of the characters in this movie use slang expressions that were very up-to-date for urban Mexicans in 1948, but which are inaccessible to Spanish speakers from non-Mexican cultures. A Mexicana friend who watched this film with me (and who was born well after it was made) told me that she couldn't understand most of the slang.

There are some truly ludicrous soap-opera plot contrivances in this movie. Eventually we learn that Pepe's relationship with his daughter Chachita is not what it seems. Some of the twists in this movie are quite implausible. But it's extremely well-made, and the visuals are impressive throughout the film. I doubt that 'Nosotros los Pobres' is an accurate depiction of life in Mexico in 1948, but plenty of Hollywood movies are equally inaccurate in their depiction of life north of the border. This movie is highly entertaining, and I'll rate it 7 points out of 10.

Starred the great Pedro Infante and created the archetype "Pepe el Toro", the urban working class hero. It was an attempt to depict and dignify with some degree of reality the working class poor of Mexico City, several years before the more sophisticated (and pessimistic) Los Ovidados was made. Featured the young Katy Jurado as the neighborhood tramp and Carmen Montejo as the dying sister. Co-star Blanca Estela Pavón was killed shortly after filming the sequel "Ustedes los Ricos", and Evita Muñoz, the little girl, is still known today as "Chachita", her name in the movie. This is the best known and beloved film in all of Mexican cinema, not unlike "It's A Wonderful Life" is in the USA. A film that while melodramatic, holds up today and is artfully done, and must be viewed with an understanding of its social context.

I cant see why a movie so popular and important have so few reviews. Important, because it's hard to find in Mexico a people that has not seen yet, because his dialogues and his songs are part of cotidian talk, and everyone have had sometimes friends nicknamed with the figures that poblate this film (the first of a extraordinary trilogy of a wise director with a notably smell for success) Well, if you think that this popular trilogy was one of George Lucas, you are wrong. This one is the creation of Ismael Rodrìguez, that made a trilogy of films that, even that more than 50 years have passed, it's still one of those monumental hits of popular culture in Mèxico (maybe in Latinoamerica), and one of those reference points for a history in our colective dreams. We have here a Great Melodrama, with the most charismatic characters surrounding the great Pepe el Toro, (who else could be than Pedro Infante)the noble carpenter, around him are his daughter Chachita, his girlfriend La Chorreada, and unbelievable secundary characters all of them living in a world of adversities. Is a picture so sharp written and well acted that you have see to believe, the narrative is dense and barroque, you pass in matter of seconds of the most sweet tender to extreme violence to romance to suspense to unforgettable musical moments to (if you like it) a very little moment of gore (Just check the fight in the jail and you'll jump) and so and so. Very wise crafted ( I imagine that Ismael Rodrìguez could with tranquility predict the great success of it) that most people forgive all the flaws that have. Of course, is one of the most attacked mexican pictures by the rigurous critics, i should say, maybe by the fact that tends to make idilious and romantic the cruel cuestion of poverty, maybe because all the efectism in the narrative. They are right, of course, but this picture surpass all of this, in fact this is a film of stereotypes, the urban and legendary stereotypes (you just cannot imagine the enormous figure of Pedro Infante without separate him of Pepe el Toro) and in this sense i think, will be hard to imagine other film like that (I know, times are very diferent) but in the deep skin of Mèxico, one or two times at day everyone whistles like Pepe el Toro, the song "Amorcito Corazòn". I have it for sure. Ten of ten stars, of course.

P.D. You should check too "Ustedes los Ricos" , the second of the trilogy, superb like this one.