DOLORES DEL RIO

[feaito]

Dolores del Río, just like Norma Shearer, has been one classic Hollywood female star (from the '20s and '30s) that has intrigued me and to whom I’ve felt particularly drawn -since the early 1980s-, long before I first saw her perform on screen; just reading about her career and her films and looking at her photographs, caught me under her spell.

Like Shearer, she managed her career and image quite cannily. Like Shearer she had specific traits which she used to her best advantage: class, elegance, sophistication and beauty, in spite of –and I must admit it-a limited acting ability. Above being an actress she was a star and a personality.

I feel that Dolores’ style of acting was suited to the Silent Screen, most notably in “Evangeline”, one of my very favorite Silents and a film in which she glowed in the title role. As for her talking pictures, the best performance I’ve seen her give to this date has been in the atmospheric and allegorical John Ford film “The Fugitive” (1947). Handled by a good director and with a good script, Dolores could be quite mesmerizing, like in the aforementioned film; her face had an ethereal quality in it.

Over the past two days I have seen two of the films in which Dolores del Río, back in her native Mexico, co-starred with Pedro Armendáriz under the direction of the famed Mexican film director Emilio “Indio” Fernández and photographed by Gabriel Figueroa: “Las Abandonadas” (1944) and “Bugambilia” (1945), both quite outdated melodramas by today’s standards, but nevertheless entertaining, in which she got to suffer a lot, especially in the former, where she plays a poor girl who has an illegitimate child and eventually becomes a streetwalker. On the other hand, in the latter film she plays a high class, very sought-after, unattainable beauty, who falls for the wrong man, well beneath her social status, with tragic results. Her mannerisms and acting tics are most evident in both films. This kind of film, with heavy dramatics, is the predecessor of the Latin American “Telenovelas” (Soap Operas).

In the enlightening film study “The Invention of Dolores del Río” by Joanne Hershfield, which I recommend to anyone interested in the actress’ career and screen persona and in scholarly books, she states that back in Mexico, Dolores tended to portray the ideal -of Mexican men- of the submissive, passive, devoted woman, who’s willing to sacrifice herself for the sake of her children or the man she loves, as totally opposed to María Felix’s screen image (the other Diva of Mexican film), as the willful, arrogant, hot tempered, female.

Now, I plan to watch Dolores in the 1943 “Flor Silvestre” (1943) and I’m eager to obtain the most famous film of the trio Del Río-Armendáriz-Fernández: “María Candelaria” (1943), in which Dolores plays a peasant girl.

Dolores del Río is one of those fascinating movie personalities who’ll never cease to attract me.