El niño y la niebla

Dolores del Río's acting style functions as the flu in "El niño y la niebla", as she seems to have passed on her resources for melodramatic outbursts to the whole cast, this time playing a woman who is crazier than she would be willing to admit. An extremely long psychological drama, it was highly praised in its day by the Mexican film industry, winning all the Ariel awards of the year. Del Río plays Marta, a woman who has witnessed two cases of madness in her family, and who is afraid that her young son Daniel (Alejandro Ciangherotti Jr.) may have inherited a troubled min.

By 1953 it might have been quite an interesting plot, but today it looks and sounds dated, mainly due to her affected interpretation of madness, reinforced by Raúl Lavista's heavy score going from syrupy to sinister. Director Roberto Gavaldón seems to have encouraged all this, considering the manipulative script he co-wrote with Edmundo Báez, from a play by Rodolfo Usigli, an expert in tales of phobias and manias, as his novel that inspired Buñuel's "Ensayo de un crimen".

Of course, Gavaldón has often evidenced a good directorial hand, and the movie gains strength when it follows the life of Marta's husband, Guillermo (played by Pedro López Lagar), an engineer who works in the oil fields and sometimes goes to the seedy night clubs in town, trying to find in prostitutes the affection that Marta has denied him since having their child. But whenever López Lagar comes close to Del Río, both enter a competition of who is more melodramatic than the other, and young Ciangherotti, who gives the best performance of all, resorts to sentimental intonations here and there, following the example of elders.

As usual Gabriel Figueroa's cinematography is a saving grace, with a couple of scenes in which the camera movements and angles better describe the characters' fragmented minds than all the shouting and faces of the players (as the dramatic moment when Marta discovers that Daniel is a somnambulist). Watch it, but be warned. By the way, the film takes place in the Mexican town of Costa Rica, in the province of Sinaloa.

It comes as no surprise to learn that this psychological drama depicting a woman's descent into madness has been adapted from a stage play and anyone familiar with the films of Roberto Gavaldón will know this intense material to be right up his street whilst Mexico's finest cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa provides striking Expressionist touches. Both men were awarded Ariels as was Gloria Schoemann for her exemplary editing and Maurice Fontanels for Production Design. In the role of Marta who 'works in silence like a spider', Dolores del Rio received her third Ariel whilst Alejandro Ciangherotti who hailed from the Soler acting family, was recognised as best child actor.

The undisputed Prima Donna of Mexico's Golden Age, del Rio is almost imperceptibly graduating to maturer roles and in the 1960's would play the mother of Elvis Presley, Sal Mineo and Omar Sharif. Here, as a very well-preserved forty-nine year old she convinces as a woman who can still arouse the desire of two men, her long-suffering husband and her former love who comes back into her life in a way only possible in the world of film melodrama.

She and Gavaldón enjoyed a fruitful collaboration and under his direction she gives a mesmering performance which is by turns disturbing and sympathetic. The climactic scene in which she sits and knits having sent out her somnambulist son to kill her inconvenient spouse lingers long in the memory. Yes, the plot is far-fetched and the film very much of its time but can still be appreciated for both its conception and execution.

Had this film been given a Hollywood makeover one can of course think of certain actresses who would have given their eye-teeth to play Mad Marta.

The keynote is fire ; fire in the night with dantesque pictures of oil wells ;this is the story of a curse : a heredity which obsesses the heroine who anxiously questions the psychiatrists in the hospital where her mother in confined .

There's no love between Marta and her husband ,only a child,a gifted teenager ,Daniel:as far as his education is concerned , the father 's and the mother's roles are reversed ; unlike the macho dad of "tea and sympathy" ,Robert Anderson's play transferred to the screen by Vincente Minnelli , this man wants to let his son follow the way he has chosen : he loves poetry and algebra (two subjects which seem to have no rapport with each other, but "both use letters "),but the mother thinks that it does not make him a man.

"El niño y la niebla" (the boy and the fog) creates a stifling sticky atmosphere ,as the characters move in the fog , the son sleepwalking at night (the scenes are impressive),the calculating mother who is in fact victim of her lunacy which runs in the family.

It's chiefly Dolores Del Rio 's helpless fight with her mind which will haunt the viewer long after the end of the film ;one sees her,slowly but inexorably sink into lunacy ;the actress is extraordinary ,displaying all the nuances of a character who's lost her reason.