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Geron Busabos: Ang Batang Quiapo
English Translation: Geron the Tramp: The Quiapo Kid
English Title: Geron the Tramp
Year of Release: 1964 / B&W
Director: Cesar Gallardo
Screenwriter: Augusto Buenaventura
Producer: Emar Pictures
Cast: Joseph Estrada, Imelda Ilanan, Oscar Roncal, Vic Andaya, Bebong Osorio, Avel Morado, Boy Alvarez
Geron is known for defending his fellow slum dwellers of Quiapo. But this earns the ire of a gang that mulcts the people of the area. Along the way, Geron befriends the hustler Digno and street kid Beto and tries to win the love of sampaguita [jasmine] vendor Nena. But when Digno’s shady past is revealed, he joins the locally feared gang and they hatch a plot that puts Geron’s life at stake.
Like, yet unlike, Fernando Poe Jr., disgraced former President Joseph Estrada also possesses his own set of unfulfilled promises that might have affirmed his artistic reputation if he had not allowed politics to intervene in his film career. Geron Busabos and the more pointed, though also more deeply flawed, Asiong Salonga (1961, dir. Pablo Santiago) demonstrate why Erap and Da King functioned as yin and yang to each other: unlike FPJ, Estrada started out as movie villain and, in what was then a star-text innovation, clambered up the ladder to lead roles by maintaining, rather than jettisoning, his bad-guy persona. Through most of his career he remained resistant to the heroic gentrification that Poe came to prefer, and the fact that his real-life stint as villainous Chief Executive reflected his fictional persona turned out to be a disappointment not just for his film stature, but for his historical legacy as well. Though less moralistic than Asiong Salonga, Geron Busabos plays safer by stressing from the beginning the lead character’s occasionally misperceived obeisance to law and order; what distinguishes the film from a long list of Pinoy noirs is in its well-observed distillation of Quiapo-district archetypes. Estrada’s insistent and eloquent championing of society’s underdogs, coupled—at least in his early breakout films—with finely honed delivery, makes understandable how he managed to capture the imagination of the widest segment of the voting public in any Philippine presidential election.
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