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Sino ang Maysala?
English Translation: Who Is at Fault?
Year of Release: 1957 / B&W
Director: Armando Garces
Screenwriters: Luciano B. Carlos & Armando Galauran
Based on the komiks by Fausto Galauran
Producer: Sampaguita Pictures
Cast: Rogelio de la Rosa, Gloria Romero, Paraluman, Ric Rodrigo, Lolita Rodriguez, Luis Gonzales, Rosa Mia, Susan Roces, Romeo Vasquez
A fairly wealthy family’s three daughters and only son revel in their material comforts—clothes, jewelry, cars, lovers—until one wild party night, when their father commits suicide. When they discover that their fortune is all gone, the daughters scramble to maintain as much of their lifestyle as they could salvage. Carmen, the eldest, administers the family’s finances and resumes her romance with a formerly impoverished but now-rich suitor, who already happens to be married; Gloria, abandoned by her beau, resolves to focus on her career; Lolita indulges in relationships that she refuses to take seriously. Their youngest brother, Bobby, starts acting out and goes on trial for participating in criminal activity, causing the family to arrive at a reckoning of their transgressions for his sake.
One of the problems in film evaluation still plaguing unreflective academically trained commentators up to the present is the valorization of politicized material invested with the discipline of classical unities, dramatic logic, and Western performative reserve. Which is why works like Sino ang Maysala? get overlooked by critics and scholars except for seriously neglected practitioners like the late Johven Velasco. Not only do the characters’ concerns remain resolutely domestic and (predictably) increasingly melodramatic, the characters themselves are named after the actors who play them; in the case of Paraluman, her character is called “Carmen” because the original performer was supposed to be Carmen Rosales. The arrangement contributed significantly to the film’s popular appeal when “Bobby” Vasquez lived out his bad-boy behavior the way his fictional version did. Yet Sino ang Maysala? provided more than just motives for its characters’ actions. The sisters’ survival strategies may have seemed morally unacceptable during their time, but anyone who returns for another viewing will realize that women who take stock of their situation and determine their own future paths (as our very own mostly female Overseas Filipino Workers regularly do) will be preferable to the spoiled spendthrifts that their characters had been at the start. The accumulated effect on Bobby of the decline in their social stature occasions a collective reflection that could have prevented the initial tragedy that befell their father if they had had enough experience of pain and suffering to be able to recognize his situation in time to save him. Hence the judge’s climactic sermon actually functions semi-ironically, the way that Sino ang Maysala? does in Philippine film history. Velasco points out how the film provides a local counterpart to the universally popular (though similarly belatedly appreciated) Douglas Sirk melodramas of Classical Hollywood, but claims as well that the lost-generation psychological dramas of Nicholas Ray and Elia Kazan were probably just as influential. These are worthy examples for any film product to be compared with, but the best part about Sino ang Maysala? is that it set out to provide grown-up popular entertainment and made sure that it fulfilled that mission well, before everything else.
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