Shades of Black and Brown:
Visions of Mexico and Mexican-Americans in 1940s Film Noir

By Eric Enders
Previously unpublished (1999)

For this paper I was fortunate enough to receive the 1999 Rolando Hinojosa Award For Writing in Mexican American Studies from the Center For Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas. I owe thanks to Dr. Charles Ramírez Berg for his guidance on this project and on life in general.

“What is it?”
“The stuff that dreams are made of.”
—Last lines of John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941)
    spoken by Ward Bond and Humphrey Bogart

Though the closing lines of The Maltese Falcon paraphrased Shakespeare’s The Tempest, they would come to embody the essence of a uniquely American film genre that Falcon itself inaugurated: film noir. In Huston’s film, a twelve-inch statuette of a black bird represents the American Dream, for under its ugly black exterior allegedly lies $1 million in jewels. At the film’s conclusion, the falcon is revealed as a hoax — there is nothing of value inside. By extension, then, the American Dream is a fraud, full of empty promises that fail to pay off. This is film noir in a nutshell. Pinpointing the origins of this dark genre is problematic because, as critic James Naremore has noted, “We can never know when the first film noir was made.” The Maltese Falcon, though, seems as good a guess as any. The term film noir itself was not coined until shortly after World War II, when five American wartime films — The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), Laura (1944), Murder, My Sweet (1944), and The Lost Weekend (1945) — debuted in succession on Paris screens. French critics saw the five films as a group and, noticing a common theme of pessimism and darkness, called them film noir, or black film. For the next decade Hollywood studios would continue to churn out films that shared many characteristics with these first five, including high-contrast cinematography, flawed protagonists, alluring femmes fatales, and street scenes filmed at night. (Although noir elements in film certainly existed before 1941 and continue to appear today, this discussion will be limited to films made from 1941 to 1956, the period during which films noir represented a significant proportion of Hollywood productions.)

According to Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton’s landmark study of film noir, Panorama du Film Noir Americain (1955), noir filmmakers attempted to subvert Hollywood standards while working from within the Hollywood system itself. By abandoning the usual conventions of plot (happy endings), character (morally upright protagonists), and narrative structure (chronological storytelling), these filmmakers sought to “disorient the spectator.” This disorientation resulted in “the disappearance of psychological bearings or guideposts,” exposing postwar society as hypocritical and inherently corrupt. Much has been written about the films’ rejection of American values; indeed, Naremore argues that “film noir has become one of the dominant intellectual categories of the late twentieth century, operating across the entire cultural arena of art, popular memory, and criticism.” However, almost nothing has been written about a particularly striking aspect of film noir: its attitude toward Mexico and Mexican-Americans. If noir filmmakers rejected the values of postwar America, then then did they also reject the racism pervading that society? If film noir subverted traditional Hollywood filmmaking techniques, did it also subvert the stereotypical and unflattering ways in which Mexican-Americans were usually portrayed onscreen? The answers to these questions are complex. Like other American films of the 1940s, most films noir ignore the existence of Mexican-Americans altogether. On the other hand, the films noir that do depict Mexico and Mexican-American characters are noticeably more positive and less stereotypical than other Hollywood films of their period. Three American films noir of the 1940s are particularly notable in the way they deal with Mexican and Mexican-American settings and characters: Ride the Pink Horse (1947), Out of the Past (1947), and The Big Steal (1949). Significantly, each of these three films has its own distinct view of Mexico and Mexican-Americans, and each vision differs greatly from that found in standard Hollywood films.

Ride the Pink Horse: New Mexico as Foreign Country

Perhaps 1947 was an appropriate year for Robert Montgomery’s Ride the Pink Horse to be made. The end of World War II had sparked a desire for racial equality among American minorities who, after fighting for freedom abroad, now devoted their efforts to fighting for freedom at home. Ride the Pink Horse premiered on Oct. 8, 1947, at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theater. Two days earlier, across town at Yankee Stadium, Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to play in the World Series, had delighted fans of all races with his stellar play in the decisive game seven. Nineteen forty-seven also marked the awakening of a new social consciousness among Hollywood filmmakers. Two of the most critically acclaimed films of the year, Crossfire and Gentleman’s Agreement, attacked anti-Semitism; between them they received ten Academy Award nominations.

It was into this changing social landscape that Ride the Pink Horse was released. The film noir set in New Mexico was praised by most of the influential critics of the day, including Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who called it “exceptional” and “a fascinating film.” The critics particularly praised the actors who played the film’s two major Mexican-American roles: Wanda Hendrix as Pila and Thomas Gómez as Pancho.  Variety commended Hendrix’s work as “a socko performance,” while Crowther said it was “remarkably sensitive and reflective of sad and mystic moods.” Though the critics agreed that Hendrix’s performance was excellent, they could not agree on what her ethnicity was supposed to be: Crowther called her “a little Mexican moon-child,” while James Agee of The Nation referred to her simply as “a young Indian girl.” Interestingly, none of the reviewers distinguished between Mexicans and Mexican-Americans; all reviews referred to the film’s Latino characters simply as “Mexicans,” though they were obviously not citizens of Mexico. In addition to Hendrix, critics also praised the work of Thomas Gómez, the New York-born character actor who was the only Latino to play a major role in the film. Though Variety and The Times both complimented Gómez’s work merely as an afterthought, his performance as Pancho was impressive enough to net him an Academy Award nomination, making him the first Latino actor to be so honored.

Other than commenting on the actors’ performances, The Times and Variety reviews didn’t discuss the characters’ ethnicity. However, two more perceptive reviews noted that the film relied on stereotypes in creating its Latino characters. In The New Yorker, John McCarten poked fun at the film’s stereotypical setting, “a small Southwestern town populated largely by Mexicans who speak standard Hollywood broken English.” But James Agee of the progressive magazine The Nation lauded the film’s intentions, calling it “practically revolutionary for a West Coast picture; it obviously intends to show that Mexicans and Indians are capable of great courage and loyalty, even to a white American, and can help him out of a hole if they like him.” Agee praised one particular scene where the white hero and Mexican-American heroine walk into a fancy restaurant together, “and the reactions of the diners and hired help are recorded with simplicity, accuracy, and courage.” However, Agee criticized the movie’s paternalistic attitude toward Mexican-Americans, noting that Hendrix’s character “is shown also to be no serious threat in any traditional movie sense — a mere child with a crush on the white hero, not a possible sweetheart, and something of a little savage at that.” The critic also lamented the fact that “in spite of good intentions the chief Mexican, Thomas Gómez, is just a character actor.” On balance, then, Agee interpreted Ride the Pink Horse as a film whose heart was in the right place, even if its head sometimes wasn’t.

Agee was mostly correct in his assessment of the film’s Mexican-American characters. In general, they are sympathetic and helpful to the protagonist, but also utterly harmless and childlike. Gómez’s Pancho, particularly, is the very embodiment of the stereotypical male buffoon who does nothing but sit in the shade and drink tequila. He also speaks standard Hollywood broken English. At one point he tells Montgomery, who has been looking for a place to stay: “Maybe some Indian or Mexican have room in his house. Very crowded, them houses. But give them a few bucks, maybe they move.” Pancho seems to enjoy making light of the socioeconomic status of his fellow Mexican-Americans: later in the film, he says, “We all same kind of people. We all born for be broke.” Pancho is a more cheerful version of Gold Hat from Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He is friendly enough, and even proves to be courageous in a fight, but the film makes it clear that he is intellectually inferior to the hero. His primary function, it seems, is to serve as a sort of tour guide for Montgomery’s venture into an unfamiliar culture.

Wanda Hendrix’s Pila, on the other hand, is a much more complicated character. She is either Native American or Mexican-American — the film never specifies which. She speaks Spanish, but her hair and clothes are those of a traditional Hollywood Indian. Whatever her ethnicity, the film definitely places Pila at the margins of society. In fact, her character embodies so many different stereotypes that it almost ceases to be stereotypical; she is a unique blend of the dark lady, half-breed harlot, and female clown, all rolled into one childlike package. When she first sees Montgomery at the beginning of the film, her eyes light up at the sight of an attractive white man. Though she practically throws herself at Montgomery, she is clearly not suitable as a romantic match for the hero, who finds himself constantly brushing off her sexual advances. Though the cross around her neck identifies her as a Christian, she places a great deal of faith in superstition as well. At the beginning of the film she gives Montgomery a Kachina doll which is supposed to protect him; later, she has a mystical vision of Montgomery dying. The Pila character is hard to understand because she is a conglomeration of contradictory stereotypes: she is mysterious yet simplistic, sexually aggressive yet childlike, wise yet naïve.

Robert Montgomery’s character, Gagin, is somewhat simpler: he is a straightforward, hard-boiled noir antihero. He shows how tough he is by mistreating Hendrix, mainly through the use of ethnic slurs. Throughout the film he calls her “Sitting Bull,” and when she gets too annoying he tells her to “go home and play with your buffaloes.” Later, when he realizes he can’t get rid of her, he makes requests such as, “Okay, Sitting Bull, why don’t you give us a war whoop?” Even worse, he gives her money so she can fix her hair, telling her to “make yourself look human.” It’s not just minorities that he dislikes, though. Even white women are nothing but “dead fish with a lot of perfume.” Apparently nobody is immune from his sense of superiority: Even Pancho, who saves Gagin’s life, is just a “fat slob.” Though he is the film’s protagonist, Gagin’s cruelty toward others ultimately makes him less sympathetic than the Latino characters at the margins.

Montgomery the director goes to great lengths to emphasize that Montgomery the star has entered a foreign world, even if it is officially part of the United States. The film’s setting is San Pablo, a Santa Fé-like town where everyone speaks Spanish. Montgomery knows he is in trouble when, upon his arrival, he glances up at a sign that reads:

Welcome to San Pablo
Buenos Días
Howdy!

From the moment he sees the welcome sign in Spanish, Gagin knows he is not welcome at all. He — and the audience — are on unfamiliar ground. Montgomery emphasizes this sense of foreignness by including several scenes where characters hold lengthy, untranslated conversations in Spanish. Gagin has seemingly left “civilization” behind completely; he is now in a treacherous world where people have dark skin and speak a language he cannot understand. Even the La Fonda hotel, the town’s sole refuge for the white upper-middle class, cannot find him a room, forcing him to spend the night in Pancho’s shabby lean-to. When Gagin walks into the local cantina, all activity stops while the customers stare at him like an animal in a zoo. They are further shocked when he orders whiskey — all they serve is tequila. Later, while the townspeople are heartily enjoying the parade, we see a long shot of Montgomery walking down the street alone, observing from afar. Like Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, he finds himself isolated in a society to which he can never fully belong.

To be sure, Ride the Pink Horse relies a great deal on stereotyping in creating its Mexican-American characters. They are kept at the margins because the film stereotypes them as childlike and ignorant. The Mexican-Americans in the film pose no threat because they are neither intelligent nor ambitious enough to do so.  However, the film’s intent is obviously not to antagonize Latinos. Rather than the one-dimensional villains found in so many Hollywood films, the Mexican-American characters in Montgomery’s film are wholly sympathetic; they’re the good guys. In fact, it can be argued that they are more sympathetic than, and morally superior to, the film’s protagonist — making Ride the Pink Horse almost unique among Hollywood films of its era.

Out of the Past: Paradise Across the Border

Riding on the heels of Ride the Pink Horse was Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, which debuted a month later and was the first 1940s film noir to take place, albeit only partially, in Mexico itself. The film starred Robert Mitchum as a seedy private detective, Kirk Douglas as a gangster who hires him, and Jane Greer as a woman who keeps double-crossing both of them. Unlike Ride the Pink Horse, which was set entirely in a small New Mexican village, Out of the Past is a virtual travelogue of exotic locales. It starts off in small-town California and moves from there to New York, Acapulco, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Lake Tahoe. Also unlike Ride the Pink Horse, it is a quintessential example of the genre that would later become known as film noir. Out of the Past contains all the elements of a prototypical noir, including contrasting shadows, many scenes filmed at night, a beautiful femme fatale, and a flawed protagonist with his own personal code of conduct. It is also one of the most relentlessly downbeat films ever made in Hollywood.

That pessimism is exactly what makes Out of the Past notable in its representation of Mexico. Tourneur and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring (writing as Geoffrey Homes due to the blacklist) depict the United States as a hopelessly corrupt society from which its characters are driven to escape. There are two ways to escape this society: symbolically, by dying; and literally, by leaving the country. Mitchum and Greer, the doomed lovers in Out of the Past, do both. At the beginning of the film, Mitchum has been hired to find Greer, who has shot her gangster lover Douglas and fled to Mexico. Mitchum tracks her to Mexico City and then Acapulco before she conveniently walks into the small cantina where he is drinking. Mitchum immediately falls in love with Greer, and instead of taking her back to Douglas, the pair stay in Acapulco and become lovers. They spend a brief, blissful period together in Mexico before Douglas appears and they are compelled to return to the United States. Back on the northern side of the border, the characters fall back into the trapped lives that noir protagonists usually lead: Mitchum is once again an unlucky down-and-outer, while Greer is forced to stay with gangster Douglas, whom she does not love. Mexico provided a momentary escape from the harsh realities of urban America, and the two spend the rest of the film trying to, as Greer’s character puts it, “go back to Acapulco and start all over as if nothing had ever happened.” In the end they are unable to do so, and are killed trying to get back to the border.

If film noir was an attempt by American filmmakers to reject the standard Hollywood aesthetic, then Out of the Past’s way of expressing this rebellion was by portraying life in Mexico as preferable to that in the United States. According to Naremore, “During the 1940s, noir characters visited Latin America more often than any other locale, usually because they wanted to find relief from repression.” Though this statement probably applies more to South America than to Mexico, Out of the Past’s protagonists clearly went south for what Naremore terms “psychological catharsis.” By staying in Acapulco for as long as possible, Mitchum and Greer were able to temporarily cleanse themselves of the filth of the American city. Mitchum’s and Greer’s characters are not inherently evil; if they had been able to stay in Mexico permanently, they might have led much different lives. It is the dark streets of the United States that corrupt them beyond possibility of redemption. Various filmmaking techniques are used to convey this impression. For example, the scenes set in Mexico are visually much lighter than the gloomy scenes in the United States. Mainwaring’s script gives the protagonists a reverence for Mexico highly unusual for an American film. The acting also contributes to this feeling; the performers speak of Acapulco as fondly and wistfully as if it were their hometown. Interestingly, though Out of the Past was relatively well-received by the critics, none of them recognized the importance of Mexico in the narrative or the commentary on American life that resulted.

Whatever its thematic intentions, Out of the Past does contain some stereotypical Mexican settings. For example, Mitchum first locates Greer by learning that she was vaccinated before disappearing. “You don’t get vaccinated for Florida,” he says, “but you do for Mexico.” In addition, the Acapulco that Mitchum visits is a place full of street vendors, bars, and gambling houses; nobody actually seems to live in this town. Everybody in Acapulco is always hawking something or other; one man is so persistent in trying to sell Mitchum lottery tickets and jewelry that Mitchum buys some earrings from him just to shut him up. Mitchum is relieved to find Greer in Acapulco because, he says, “I haven’t spoken to anyone who hasn’t tried to sell me something in 10 days.” In fact, this statement could just as easily have been made about the United States. Such stereotypical statements suggest that the filmmakers do not really seek to understand Mexico, but are merely using it to serve a specific thematic purpose. The conclusion one must draw from Out of the Past, then, is that although it contains an extremely favorable representation of Mexico, the filmmakers see that country not as an actual place with real people, but as a purely symbolic avenue of escape from American problems.

The Big Steal: The Crazy Americanos

Don Siegel’s The Big Steal (1949) attempted to capitalize on the success of Out of the Past by reuniting that film’s stars, Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, and its screenwriter, Daniel Mainwaring (again writing as Geoffrey Homes). But rather than serving as a brief respite from reality as in Out of the Past, this time Mexico is the background for an exhilarating series of chase scenes. The story involves Mitchum and Greer pursuing thief Patric Knowles while simultaneously being chased by lawman William Bendix. As the four characters chase each other across Mexico, a fifth — a Mexican police inspector played by Ramon Novarro — just looks on and (to quote John Huston’s description of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) “lets them stew in their own juice.” Like Out of the Past, The Big Steal implies that life in Mexico is superior to that in the United States. However, The Big Steal lacks the dark imagery and fatalistic tone of its predecessor, making its point instead with ironic humor. The Big Steal is set in Mexico from beginning to end, and presumably it is not as pessimistic as Out of the Past because its characters have managed to escape the slimy underworld of urban America. The Big Steal is like a more optimistic cousin of Out of the Past in which Mitchum and Greer, instead of dying, manage to find relative happiness in Mexico.

Rather than criticizing the United States itself, The Big Steal pokes fun at American notions of cultural superiority, often in subtle ways. A main theme of the film is that Americans are always in a hurry, which often causes them to act foolishly. The Americans in the film are shown rushing to get from place to place, while the Mexican characters approach life in a more leisurely fashion. The implication is clear that the Mexican way of life is superior. In one humorous scene, Mitchum rushes out of a barbershop, tossing the Mexican barber a coin even though he has not yet received his haircut. “Loco,” says the barber to a friend. His friend explains Mitchum’s apparent insanity with a single word: “Americano.” The crazy Americans, meanwhile, are constantly frustrated that Mexican life moves at a slower pace than their own. In several scenes, American drivers honk when carts and animals in front of them do not go fast enough. In another humorous scene, Mitchum herds a flock of goats into the middle of the road to block the path of Bendix, his pursuer. (In The Big Steal, unlike the usual Hollywood portrayals of Mexico, most of the roads are paved.) The film is full of shots of cars careening through the countryside while the perplexed natives look on. The implication is that Americans are unsafe and reckless, while Mexicans have their feet on the ground — literally. “You Americans are always in a hurry,” Novarro’s Col. Ortega observes with bewilderment.

The importance of language is another central theme of The Big Steal. Mitchum’s soldier, like so many noir protagonists, is tough and crude. This characterization is accomplished largely by illustrating the problems he has with the Spanish language. Greer, meanwhile, comes off as caring and intelligent, largely because she speaks Spanish fluently. This contrast between the two protagonists is established in their first meeting, at a train station, when Mitchum yells impatiently at a guitarist who is annoying him:

Mitchum (to guitarist): “Scram—por favor!”
Greer: “It’s people like you who make people like them contemptuous of tourists.
            Doesn’t it occur to you they don’t understand?”
Mitchum: “What, I spoke to him in Spanish.”
Greer: “Oh, is that what it was?”

For the rest of the film, Greer’s and Mitchum’s characters are defined by their knowledge of Spanish, or lack thereof. Mitchum knows only a few words of the language, and Greer quickly takes exception to the nickname he pins on her. “Stop calling me Chiquita,” she complains. “You don’t say that to girls you don’t even know.” “Where I come from you do,” Mitchum retorts — implying that, as an American soldier, he has spent time in the in the bordertown brothels of Tijuana and Juárez. Mitchum’s attitude toward the language is close to contempt, although his lack of fluency forces him to rely on Greer in important situations. At one point, Greer is discussing a police matter with Novarro in Spanish, while Mitchum can only stand by helplessly. Later, Greer slyly convinces a Spanish-speaking construction foreman to help the pair evade Bendix. These scenes are presented without subtitles, making viewers who understand Spanish privy to inside jokes such as the exchange between Greer and the foreman: “¿Verdad que es grande y hermoso, no?” Greer says, looking at the oblivious Mitchum. The foreman replies, “Grande, sí, pero hermoso...” The joke is on Mitchum, and by extension, on the viewer who does not understand Spanish. Bendix’s character, meanwhile, encounters difficulties chasing Mitchum and Greer because he does not understand Spanish. He seems to take offense at Mexicans not understanding English, although he admits about himelf, “No habla Spanish so good.”

In contrast, Novarro’s Mexican police inspector is articulate in both English and Spanish, and he is easily the most intelligent and refined character in the film. He immediately senses that something is amiss, but he doesn’t let on— instead, he sits back and marvels at the Americans’ ineptitude at chasing each other. He has fun at their expense as well: When he first meets the protagonists, he lets Mitchum speak to him in broken Spanish for a few moments before declaring, “Oh! I speak English.” Although he has been educated at Berkeley, Col. Ortega never loses an opportunity to improve his language skills, in marked contrast to Mitchum. As if the existence of such a nonstereotypical Mexican character in 1940s Hollywood were not remarkable enough, it is even more suprising that Novarro, an actual Mexican, was cast in the role. His performance received positive notices from several influential publications, including Variety, which praised his role as “the hep Mexican police officer who lets the pawns in the game do most of his work for him.”

Novarro’s performance, however, was virtually the only thing critics found praiseworthy about the film. New Republic’s Robert Hatch was particularly harsh, calling The Big Steal “a ludicrous miscarriage of an adventure picture,” with scenes that were “wooden, implausible, and humorless.” Even The Nation — which two years earlier had published a particularly perceptive review of Ride the Pink Horse— ignored The Big Steal altogether. But Bosley Crowther of The New York Times admired the film, observing that “even though most of the humor is unimaginatively composed of Americans having trouble with the native language and various obstructions in the dusty roads, including goats, ox carts, and lazy people, it is rather ingenious and refreshingly plausible.” None of the critics, however, discussed (or perhaps even noticed) the film’s implication that life in Mexico is superior to American hustle and bustle. To them, it was simply another chase picture that happened to be set in Mexico. But to Mainwaring, Siegel, and the others involved in making it, The Big Steal was clearly an attempt to contradict Hollywood conventions, particularly those regarding Mexican characters and settings.

Neo-Noir: Out of the Past and Into the Future

In the mid-1950s the number of noir pictures made in Hollywood slowed to a trickle. Some of the same French critics who had helped define film noir a decade earlier now heralded Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me, Deadly (1955) as the end of the genre. Still, noir was clearly an influence on countless films over the next forty-plus years, and full-fledged noir pictures appeared every so often. One of these was Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), a tale of murder and intrigue set on the U.S.-Mexico border. Welles’ film jumps back and forth over the border so much that it is often impossible to distinguish in which country a particular scene is taking place — which, of course, is exactly Welles’ point. This subversion of the border line, in addition to the presence of an articulate, intelligent Mexican protagonist, makes Touch of Evil an overwhelmingly positive and nonstereotypical view of the border. Later classics such as Chinatown (1974) and Blade Runner (1982), meanwhile, contain Latino characters whose ethnicity is never an issue. On the whole, recent noir-influenced films have emulated their predecessors’ rejection of traditional methods of Hollywood filmmaking. In so doing, they have also continued the genre’s comparatively sympathetic portrayals of Mexico and Mexican-Americans.  

Click on the ad below to search for classic movie posters at MovieGoods.com

Click here to search for film noir videos, DVDs, or books at Amazon.com

EricEnders.com Home
Baseball · Books · Film · Music · Photography