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The Passionate Strangers
Language: English
Additional Language: Tagalog
Year of Release: 1966 / B&W
Director & Screenwriter: Eddie Romero
Producer: MJP Productions
Cast: Michael Parsons, Valora Noland, Mario Montenegro, Celia Rodriguez, Vic Diaz, Butz Aquino, Claude Wilson, Jose Dagumboy, Bong Calumpang, Cesar Aguilar
In trying to uncover his wife’s affair with another man, Adam accidentally kills a labor union leader. An initial investigation insinuates the involvement of the American company Adam works for, inasmuch as its previous negotiations with the slain union leader did not push through. Soon, Adam’s crime of passion escalates into a murder dealing with issues of racial difference.
As a protégé of Gerardo de Leon, Eddie Romero’s curse also became his advantage: as long as he could work with de Leon, he never needed to worry about focusing on directorial expertise, just as de Leon could always count on a pool of outstanding writers for his scripts. The best Romero films would therefore tend to be so well-written that their technical shortcomings can be overlooked. An outstanding sample would be the now-lost Sa Atin ang Daigdig (The World Is Ours, 1963, credited to Cesar J. Amigo but claimed in interviews by Romero, who’s credited as scriptwriter). The Passionate Strangers is even more ambitious in tackling neocolonial US presence, labor unrest, and interracial romance, unfolding the tinderbox situation via the opportunistic investigations conducted by a cynical, perceptive, yet paradoxically humane local-government official—wonderfully essayed by the usually taken-for-granted Vic Diaz. Despite its US B-film pedigree, this entry, rather than Romero’s well-received apology for US military presence, The Day of the Trumpet (a.k.a. Cavalry Command, 1958), earns its designation as “Filipino” more than most other projects by him, if not by other Filipinos. Adults who mess up their lives despite their best intentions: that appears to have been Romero’s recurrent theme, and it has never been encapsulated any better than in this overlooked gem.
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Savage Sisters
Language: English
Additional Language: Tagalog
Year of Release: 1974
Director: Eddie Romero
Screenwriters: H. Franco Moon & Harry Corner
Producer: Cinema Projects International & Hemisphere Pictures
Cast: Gloria Hendry, Cheri Caffaro, Rosanna Ortiz, Sid Haig, Eddie Garcia, Rita Gomez, Leopoldo Salcedo, Vic Diaz, Dindo Fernando, Angelo Ventura, Romeo Rivera, Alfonso Carvajal, Robert Rivera, Subas Herrero, John Platter, Bruno Punzalan, Joonee Gamboa, Max Rojo, Johnny Long, John Ashley
Jo Turner, a white American fighting for the same cause as her revolutionary lover Ernesto, has been arrested along with her Asian comrade Mei Ling. The two are brought along with other women to a correctional, where a black warden, Lynn Jackson, recognizes Mei Ling as a former sex-work colleague. Jo and Mei Ling are aware that Ernesto’s team plans to swipe a million dollars from a government delivery vehicle so they can be rescued and overthrow the corrupt military regime running the island territory. Ernesto and his friends, however, are double-crossed by the mercenaries who promised to help them for a share of the money. Jo and Mei Ling plot to escape so they can recover the funds but when Lynn learns about their plan, she volunteers to help them for an equal portion. Working as a threesome, the women encounter Billingsley, whom the mercenaries contacted to provide them with a ship to get off the island. When he tells them that he wants to be of help, they have to determine first whether he can be trusted.
Although dismissive of his coproduction projects, Eddie Romero was able to claim some bragging rights when an American colleague, Jonathan Demme, managed to parlay his B-filmmaking training (spent partly in the Philippines) into critical acclaim, culminating in an Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs (1991).[1] His Demme collaboration was the project prior to Savage Sisters, Black Mama White Mama (1973), which provided Pam Grier with her blaxploitation breakout role. Savage Sisters proceeded from BMWM’s pointed critiques of race and power, but evades the latter’s heavy-handedness by adding not just an extra racial subject (via an Oriental character) but also an expanded number of satirical targets, mostly patriarchal but including an oversexed prison matron. The proliferation of players dilutes the film’s ideological purpose just enough to enable it to provide the diversions required of genre entertainment, inasmuch as the locales of these projects, extending back to the Blood Island films of the 1960s, were never meant to be identifiable in the first place. Ironically, Romero’s immersion in exploitation-film practice may have been key to his further (though not complete) distancing from Cold War ideals. Filmic expertise had never been a previous component of his store of capabilities, since he could always rely on Gerardo de Leon to accomplish his vision; but with the latter’s semi-retired status, Romero had no choice except to overcome his hesitation about creating films for American drive-in audiences and reached a point, with Savage Sisters, from which he was able to embark on his most successfully realized material in his next film, Ganito Kami Noon … Paano Kayo Ngayon? (As We Were, 1976).
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Ganito Kami Noon … Paano Kayo Ngayon?
English Translation: This Was How We Were Then … What Happens to You Now?
English Title: As We Were
Additional Languages: Spanish, Chinese
Year of Release: 1976
Director: Eddie Romero
Screenwriters: Eddie Romero & Roy Iglesias
Producer: Hemisphere Pictures
Cast: Christopher de Leon, Gloria Diaz, Eddie Garcia, Dranreb, Leopoldo Salcedo, Rosemarie Gil, E.A. Rocha, Johnny Vicar, Tsing Tong Tsai, Jaime Fabregas, Peque Gallaga, Odette Khan, Laida Lim-Perez, Teresita Non
After his hut burns down, Kulas meets a priest who asks the young man to bring his illegitimate son to Manila. Kulas and the priest’s son soon meet a traveling theater group. Though Kulas falls for the actress Diding, he prioritizes his assignment. Upon arriving in Manila, he becomes a sophisticate with the help of the priest’s lawyer. But he will face a bigger change just as Diding re-enters his life and the country, confronted by US imperialism right after expelling its Spanish colonizers, marks a pivotal point in its history.
Rarely has a Filipino film project had better timing than Ganito Kami Noon. Eddie Romero had just ended a fairly successful run of Fil-Am co-productions; his mentor Gerardo de Leon had just completed his last movie even as Lino Brocka was leading the charge in effectively announcing a renewed film consciousness; an uncertain stability had been forcibly imposed by the military takeover of film-censorship functions barely three years after the declaration of martial rule; and someone had to be able to demonstrate that people from the previous Golden Age could still productively contribute to the then-dawning new cinema. Like the earlier volumes of the martial-law government’s official Tadhana (Fate) book series on Philippine “history,” Ganito Kami Noon also benefited—where Romero’s subsequent Aguila (1980) did not—from maintaining a focus on the past. The project could by then successfully formulate a progressive perspective regarding the influx of foreign invaders and the emergence of a native bourgeois class. Despite a whiff of sexism in the movie’s moral downgrading of a strong woman character, Romero’s cosmopolitanism served him well against the usual accusation of xenophobia that accompanies nationalist texts: Ganito Kami Noon was one of the first films on Philippine history that acknowledged the revolutionary contribution of Chinese-Filipino citizens.[2] On the whole, its humanism turned out to be just right for a narrative that sought to present multiple conflicting points of view. And though such an equal-opportunity approach could not permit intensive discursive analysis, Romero’s wit and humor allow the viewer to digest the proceedings with less of the bitterness that tends to lace grand-scale historical conflicts.
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Banta ng Kahapon
English Translation: Yesterday’s Warning
English Title: Doublecross
Year of Release: 1977 / Sepia (faded coloration)
Director & Screenwriter: Eddie Romero
Producers: Hemisphere Pictures & Shelter Films
Cast: Bembol Roco, Vic Vargas, Chanda Romero, Roland Dantes, Lito Legaspi, Roderick Paulate, Ruben Rustia, Celita de Castro, Romeo Rivera, Karim Kiram, Olvia O’Hara, Henri Salcedo, Johnny Vicar, Jose Garcia, Roma Roces, Rose Gacula, Gil Arceo, Herman Magsipok, Roger Robles, Zahn Garduce, Joe Watts, Ramon “Palaka,” PMP Stuntmen
In the present time, Greg pauses from working as a janitor in a colonial government building to take a look at the political headlines on a broadsheet. He recalls an earlier period, the turbulent election year of 1969, when a mute convict, addressed as Mangubat by the prison warden, is released after serving his time. He’s followed by shady characters in a car to his home in the slums, where he arrives just as his father dies from an illness and his sister berates him for failing to assist their situation. When he steps out, the men following him address him as Kuwago [Owl] and offer him a well-paying one-shot job to assassinate an elected official. After he turns over his earnings to his sister, his contacts double-cross him but he’s able to escape them. Police bring him to a hospital where more men arrive to finish him off. He flees the hospital and encounters a street urchin, Berto, who offers to help him by asking his sister, who lives on a small island community, to help in his recovery. Greg, who’s helping Bobby, the son of the assassinated politician, to track down the people who want his father killed, follows Kuwago to the island and offers him help in arresting the men who double-crossed him.
Eddie Romero tended to have better results when he worked on small-scale undertakings, with the singular exception of Ganito Kami Noon … Paano Kayo Ngayon? (As We Were, 1976). Aside from the titles selected in the current canon listing, his unfortunately lost peak achievement would include the screenplay of Cesar J. Amigo’s Sa Atin ang Daigdig (The World Is Ours, 1963). Intended as part of a loose series on Philippine history, Banta ng Kahapon covers the more-or-less contemporary era, after Ganito Kami Noon tackled colonial transition and Kamakalawa (The Day Before Yesterday, 1981), too directorially slapdash to be given more than passing attention, depicted the magical world of the country’s precolonial era yielding to social governance and material productivity; a special case would be Aguila (1980), an epic tale appropriately headlined by Fernando Poe Jr., which was so much a celebration of Philippine history that it was willing to accept the lies and excesses of the fascist dictatorship in arriving at its present period. Like The Passionate Strangers (1966) and unlike his epic works, the characters in BnK do not seek to influence or disrupt Philippine history, doing instead the best they can to claim what they regard as their rightful share while adhering to their idea of principled behavior. They eventually get overpowered by forces beyond their control, but like the great film-noir heroes, their best efforts provide us with illumination, if not much inspiration. We can count ourselves fortunate that the most dismissible narrative element in BnK, the framing story, is set in the historical present, knowing how enthusiastically Romero welcomed the avowals of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s New Society. His depiction of the violence-ridden recent past managed to bring out the light-handed cynicism that constantly elevated his outstanding output—of which, in this particular instance, apparently and alarmingly what remains is the telecine transfer of a faded copy of the print created for the 1983 Manila International Film Festival’s Focus on Filipino Film module.
Note
[1] Eddie Romero’s unbecoming and problematically classist assertion appears in Bliss Cua Lim’s article “‘American Pictures Made by Filipinos’: Eddie Romero’s Jungle-Horror Exploitation Films,” Spectator 22.1 (April 2002), pp. 23–45. The Blood Island film cycle (drawn from the reissue title of Gerardo de Leon’s Terror Is a Man, 1959) was in fact appropriated from an earlier Hammer Films release, Val Guest’s The Camp on Blood Island (1958), which was all about Japanese atrocities during World War II set on a Malayan island—see the capsule review of Terror Is a Man in the relevant de Leon entry. The Blood Island film cycle, all reworkings of or variations on H.G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, covers about a dozen titles made throughout the 1960s to the early 1970s, by either de Leon and/or Romero, plus Al Adamson’s Brain of Blood (1971); Hammer Films, for its part, returned to the Oriental setting with a prequel, The Secret of Blood Island (Quentin Lawrence, 1965) and coproduced with Shaw Brothers a hybrid East-meets-West entry, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (Roy Ward Baker, 1974). A new Pinas-grown cycle, in which Savage Sisters may be counted, emerged in the early 1970s, comprising far more pliable narratives of women in island prisons breaking out in pursuit of various personal or political agendas. The new imprisoned-women genre is actually subsumable under a longer exploitation-film tradition directed at the male gaze.
[2] Worth mentioning is the fact that accounts of uprisings by the Chinese community in the Philippines during the Spanish period had appeared in historical records: the Parián de Arroceros transformed from a marketplace into a Sangley ghetto adjacent to Intramuros, which effectively excluded its residents from the Walled City and made them vulnerable to abuses by colonial forces. Some of these narratives found their way into literature and even film samples prior to Ganito Kami Noon. In the previous year, Xing long fu hu (Sleeping Dragon), a film codirected by Ishmael Bernal and Jimmy L. Pascual and cowritten by Wilfrido D. Nolledo and Ophelia San Juan, was set during the Parián rebellion of 1603. It was screened in the country as well as overseas, but the full print is apparently lost and only a trailer is available. See Andrew Leavold, “Sleeping Dragon (1975),” The Bamboo Gods Project, November 4, 2023.
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