Canon Decampment: Gregorio Fernandez

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Kontrabando

English Title: Contraband
Year of Release: 1950 / B&W
Director: Gregorio Fernandez
Screenwriter: Armando Garces (as Armando Garcez)
From the story “G-2, Ang Tiktik ng Hukbong Pilipino (G-2, The Detective of the Philippine Army)” by Major Amado A. Esguera
Producer: LVN Pictures

Cast: Jaime de la Rosa, Celia Flor, Tony Santos, Milagros Naval, Gregorio Fernandez (as G.M.F.), Eusebio Gomez, Ezar Visenio, Armando Garces (as Armando Garcez), Martin Marfil, Jose Corazon de Jesus Jr., Juanito Montes, Citas Javellana, Natoy B. Catindig, Joe Evangelista, Tita Ramirez, Ray Bayona, Mauro Cajigal, Flor Bien, Franco Quintana

Diego Malvar, a G-2 undercover operative, is able to infiltrate the smuggling syndicate run by Lim. In order to help him bust the trafficking of opium, surreptitiously brought in by deported aliens, his supervisor provides him with a newfangled spy camera as well as a code word, “Divina.” In pursuit of his objective, he falls in love with Celia, the daughter of Lim’s family friend. Lim’s adopted daughter, Minda, comes from Jolo and is secretly promised by Lim to Asad, his Muslim henchman. Unaware of the arrangement, Minda has set her sights on Datu Ali, whom Lim misleads so he can land contraband shipments in Mindanao. As Lim’s biggest operation comes to a head, Diego has to find someone he can trust, identify the gang’s kingpin whose orders Lim follows, and find the best possible way to survive the risky project with head and heart intact.

Kontrabando is by and large the perfect encapsulation in Philippine cinema of a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Virtually forgotten by subsequent generations, Gregorio Fernandez had enough evidence of then being the most talented director inside the LVN Pictures lot, so it made sense that he was the first filmmaker deployed to fulfill the studio’s commitment (via Manuel de Leon, the most enthusiastic Filipino participant in the US-sponsored Federation of Motion Picture Producers in Asia-Pacific) to provide three projects for the cause of anti-Communist agitation.[1] It will be impossible to fully evaluate this trilogy since the second installment, Korea from 1952, has been lost for the longest time, despite having been scripted by Benigno S. Aquino Jr. Then again, the fact that this second entry as well as the third one (Huk sa Bagong Pamumuhay or Rebel in a New Life, 1953) were both directed by Lamberto V. Avellana, suggests that Fernandez failed in what he was tasked to do. In fact, what may have been a propagandistic disappointment has ironically turned out to be a vital contribution to Philippine film culture, with the only definitive evidence of “Yoyong” being the best director-actor we ever had constituting a minor detail in context. The demonization of Chinese nationals was part and parcel of the anti-Commie thrust, but Fernandez reduces the threat to ideologically irrelevant drug smuggling and sets up the distinctively chinita Celia Flor as prospective femme fatale with a twist, in much the same way that his previous year’s Capas featured a conflicted Japanese Imperial Army official confronted by a guerrilla masquerading as collaborator. Moreover, the swagger, suavity, and situational ruses enacted by Jaime de la Rosa, drawn from global film sources from all over, predate their amalgamation in the James Bond franchise. Most impressively, Fernandez mounts a challenge to the supposed (Christian) godliness of Western democracy by allowing organized Muslim Filipinos to save the narrative heroes from certain perdition. The question of whether he intended to fail as a Cold War champion becomes inconsequential when set beside such multivalent triumphs in film innovation.

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Prinsipe Teñoso

English Translation: Prince Teñoso
Year of Release: 1954
Director: Gregorio Fernandez
Screenwriter: Johnny Legarda
Based on an earlier script by Manuel Conde, adapted from the korido on Prince Don Juan Teñoso
Producer: LVN Pictures

Cast: Delia Razon, Mario Montenegro, Tony Santos, Alfonso Carvajal, Ven Medina, Frankie Gordon, Oscar Obligacion, Arturo Moran, Carmencita Abad, Cecilia Lopez, Liza Rivera, Lourdes Yumul, Natoy B. Catindig, Mario Taguibulos, Gregorio Fernandez (as G.M.F.), Sim Pajarillo, Manuel Lizaso, Merle Fernandez (as Merly Fernandez), T. Valenzuela, L.M. Fernandez, Perla Garcia

Prince Teñoso, an idealistic youth, returns to his father’s kingdom and sees a giant who was captured and imprisoned by the king for the sake of sport. After he determines that the prisoner is benign, he steals the giant’s magic gemstone from his father’s crown to help the creature escape. [Missing sequence: Grateful for the prince’s help, the giant provides him with a magical handkerchief. The king realizes what his son had done and banishes him from the kingdom. To atone for his father’s anger, Prince Teñoso disguises himself as an old beggar and wanders into a neighboring territory.] The king in the new kingdom is worried that he will be unable to marry off his daughters, who are too independent-minded for their suitors. An assistant suggests a contest of skills, where the princesses can pick the men who impress them. The youngest princess, however, spies on the newly arrived beggar and sees him transform into a handsome young man when he bathes in the river. She decides to favor him during the competition—a decision that baffles the court and angers her father.

Prinsipe Teñoso may be the oldest available Pinoy feature film in color, and for once our luck turned for the better. After several pioneering attempts with Ansco Film, LVN Pictures decided to hand the project, essentially a remake of a prewar Manuel Conde spectacle, to a resident director who was carefully harnessing his crowd-pleasing skills with a distinctly modern sensibility. Gregorio Fernandez’s cultural sophistication, in fact, may have been so highly evolved that evaluators of the era (and even up to the present) do not seem to have the necessary handle with which to approach his output. Fortunately for him, LVN has been the most responsible among the First Golden Age studios in caring for their celluloid legacy, so enough Fernandez movies have been lying around to demonstrate how seriously neglected his stature as major artist has been. Prinsipe Teñoso still exhibits some of the limitations of its origin in Spanish-era metric romances, camouflaged by its Ruritanian world-building where monarchs and magic hold sway, with the Christianization project championed above everything. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, Fernandez raises issues about filial devotion to patriarchs, advocates for specific types of Otherness (in this instance a captive nonindigenous giant as well as a diseased stranger in rags—the title character in disguise), and provides a Muslim partner for one of the princesses. But it is his celebration of female agency that sets the film off from even the typical Hollywood samples of its time: the princesses question the logic of requiring them to be paired off with husbands, accept early widowhood as a not-bad option, and pick out the men they want—with the youngest among them insisting on a beggar whose attractiveness she ascertained by snooping on his naked form. Prince Teñoso’s self-redemption consists of chastising his future brothers-in-law while saving his bride-to-be’s kingdom and acquiring his father’s forgiveness in the process, with Fernandez’s storytelling skills easing our journey over now-missing portions of the narrative. Surge, splendor, and extravagance are the terms used by film scholar Vivian Sobchack in describing films of this type—but Fernandez made sure to add an edginess that makes Prinsipe Teñoso still meaningful for our times as definitely as it provided entertainment way back when.

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1—Higit sa Lahat

English Translation: Most of All
Year of Release: 1955 / B&W
Director: Gregorio Fernandez
Screenwriter: Gregorio Fernandez
From a story by Mario Mijares Lopez
Producer: LVN Pictures

Cast: Rogelio de la Rosa, Emma Alegre, Ike Jarlego Jr., Oscar Keesee, Jose Corazon de Jesus Jr., Vic Silayan, Eddie Rodriguez, Cynthia Gomez, Rosa Aguirre, Ludy Carmona, Lita Gutierrez, Gerry delos Reyes, Venchito Galvez, Natoy B. Catindig, Leonardo Fernandez

Rodrigo is disowned by his rich family when he decides to marry Rosa. He finds work in a factory where his supervisor covets a necklace that Rosa had gifted him with. He decides to hand over the ornament but, while on a trip assigned by the supervisor, the factory goes up in flames. Investigators find the necklace and inform Rosa that her husband had died. When Roberto realizes that his family will receive a substantial amount of insurance money, he decides to maintain the delusion and watches over them from afar.

2—Luksang Tagumpay

English Translation: Mournful Victory [incomplete]
Year of Release: 1956 / B&W
Director: Gregorio Fernandez
Screenwriters: Mike Velarde & Consuelo O. Padilla
From a story by Mike Velarde, “as inspired by [Sergei] Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto” [per opening credit title]
Producer: LVN Pictures

Cast: Jaime de la Rosa, Delia Razon, Rebecca del Rio, Eddie Rodriguez, Rudy Fernandez, Oscar Obligacion, Leonora Ruiz, Fe Galvez, Rudy Llamas, Jesus Caballero, Gerry Gabaldon, Leandro Fernandez, Jaime Palma, Joseph de Cordova, Alfonso Carvajal, Manuel Silos, Oscar Keesee

Because her husband, Bustamante, has been presumed dead as a combatant in the Korean War, Anita decides to marry Ricardo, a doctor. But when Bustamante returns, Ricardo treats his blindness and keeps his distance from them. Alone on a night out, Bustamante meets Ricardo’s ex-girlfriend and learns from her that Anita and Ricardo were once a couple. Bustamante decides to inflict blindness on Anita but Ricardo warns her of the danger. Ricardo discovers Bustamante fatally wounded by his ex and gets arrested for murder. To save him from certain conviction, his ex-girlfriend confesses.

A definite clue to the downgrading of Gregorio Fernandez’s abilities is his specialization in the weepie, the type of melodrama acknowledging and directed at female audiences. (No use in denying that Pinoy action and sex films also rely on melodramatic conventions, even if their target audience endows them with a bit more respect, in the eyes of the hopelessly old-fashioned.) His talent definitely earned him the top industry awards he deserved for Higit sa Lahat, a gender-reversed neorealist variation on the Hollywood perennial Stella Dallas, whose 1937 King Vidor-directed version is regarded as definitive. Rogelio de la Rosa barely matches Barbara Stanwyck’s performance, but it matters little since Emma Alegre is made the object of his (and the audience’s) gaze, and she’s the most incandescent and skilled performer in any available Fernandez film until Charito Solis’s casting a few years later. Luksang Tagumpay, although a more ambitious piece, only won for direction. Its narrative is admittedly twisty and resolves more conventionally than any of the titles in Fernandez’s remarkable final run at LVN Pictures. Yet its now-lost denouement features the apocalyptic dissolution of the primary male character’s domestic environment, referencing both his psychological breakdown as well as his recent wartime traumatic experience. The use of expressive and hyper-exuberant filmic strategies would be introduced to global observers a few years afterward, via the French New Wave as well as the post-Stalinist “thaw cinema” of the Soviet Union; without an equivalent critical team providing an evaluation of the limits of Hollywood classicism and suggesting ways to challenge then-existing standard film language, Fernandez embarked on a critique all his own and attempted a carefully sustained series of formal experimentations that would distinguish his 1950s work as the first uncontestable flowering of artistic genius in local cinema.

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Hukom Roldan

English Translation: Judge Roldan
Year of Release: 1957 / B&W
Director: Gregorio Fernandez
Screenwriter: Consuelo P. Osorio
From a story by Luz del Mundo
Producer: LVN Pictures

Cast: Jaime de la Rosa, Emma Alegre, Nenita Vidal, Oscar Keesee, Alfonso Carvajal, Nela Alvarez, Marie Paz, Boots Socorro, Cholly Ulla, Gerry Gabaldon, Dulo Valenzuela, Vic Cabrera

Judge Alberto Roldan is an upright official who resists the entreaties of his influential friend, Don Silvestre, against handing down a guilty verdict against a business associate of his. In retaliation, Silvestre blackmails Alberto’s wife Cita by getting his accomplice Hernan to drug and photograph her in scandalous circumstances, succeeding in breaking up the couple’s union. Alberto sends their daughter Gloria to the US and claims upon her return that her mother is dead. Warned by Hernan that her husband and daughter will be harmed if she reveals the truth, Cita endures her husband’s harsh judgment of her character while setting out to earn a decent living on her own while keeping tabs on her estranged family.

The official canonical assessment of Gregorio Fernandez’s career has been lopsided and ultimately inadequate. Two of his mid-1950s films, Higit sa Lahat (1955) and Luksang Tagumpay (1956), garnered nominations and prizes in industry and foreign film-festival competitions whereas superior entries such as Principe Teñoso and Hukom Roldan were overlooked, while Malvarosa (1958), deservingly regarded as his masterpiece, was given a token local award. As a studio-system stalwart (whose career unsurprisingly faltered when the independent production system replaced the First Golden Age players), he demonstrated an unerring capability of critically evaluating his past output and setting up more ambitious thematic and formal challenges while continuing to provide popular entertainment. With Hukom Roldan, he set up reversals and ironies one after the other, starting with a switch in narrative emphasis from the masculine title character to his multiply victimized wife, signaled by an onscreen swirling motion that mimics her confusion, interrupted by the major characters directly addressing the audience. These violations of Classical Hollywood conventions (already evident even in his preceding melodramas) were to become standard approaches a short time later in European cinema, and may account for local evaluators’ befuddlement with Fernandez’s innovations, since these seemingly came from out of nowhere. In retrospect, we should be in a better position to appreciate an intelligent and socially concerned practitioner’s dissatisfaction with the limits of genre and storytelling while remaining steadfast in his commitment to his audience as well as to his family of creatives. The charismatic de la Rosa brothers (Jaime and Rogelio) were comfortable working with him—together at one point, while his children (Rudy in Luksang Tagumpay, Merle in Hukom Roldan) fleshed out characters who would figure prominently later as grown-ups. More poignantly, reminiscent of how appreciation for his achievements turned out, Hukom Roldan’s central mother-daughter tandem is essayed by fully capable performers—Emma Alegre and Nenita Vidal respectively—who had too-short careers in the medium. Serious observers of Philippine cinema who may think they have seen and/or read everything about the country’s film history will be rewarded anew by asking themselves who the very best studio system practitioner was and watching Fernandez’s films vis-à-vis the standard lineup.

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Malvarosa

English Translation: Geranium
Year of Release: 1958 / B&W
Director: Gregorio Fernandez
Screenwriter: Consuelo P. Osorio
Adapted from the serialized komiks by Clodualdo del Mundo Sr.
Producer: LVN Pictures

Cast: Charito Solis, Leroy Salvador, Vic Silayan, Carlos Padilla Jr., Vic Diaz, Rey Ruiz, Eddie Rodriguez, Rebecca del Rio, Linda Roxas, Johnny Reyes, Perla Bautista, Caridad Sanchez

Rosa lives in Manila’s slums and is a sister to five brothers who treat her like a servant. Adding to her troubles is how her father’s tragic death left her mother catatonic. Fortunately, her fiancé and her fifth (youngest) brother always help her. But just when her luck is about to turn for the better, Rosa faces some major obstacles that make her doubt if her lot will ever improve.

Before Sampaguita Studios launched its Stars ’66 batch of talents, complemented by its “smorgasbord” (multiple-stars) presentations, LVN Pictures embarked on what initially appeared to be a commercially motivated project, drawn from a komiks serial and featuring their biggest male stars, mostly playing brothers, plus their bombshell attraction, Charito Solis, as youngest sister as well as devoted daughter and upright girlfriend. Exploiting the full potential of its “low-brow” literary origin, Malvarosa opens with a palm reader’s accurate prediction of five sons and an only daughter being born to a dissolute couple, piles on the irony as well as the slum-colony lingo, and resolves in a large-scale apocalyptic event that cleanses not so much their material suffering as their collective soul, or whatever remains of it. Fluid direction, spitfire performances, and Solis’s timeless beauty provide much-appreciated icing for this still-urgent slice of urban life.

Note

[1] A comprehensive account of the US government’s exploitation of film to anathematize Communism in Asia can be found in Lee Sangjoon’s Cinema and the Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network (Cornell University Press, 2020). For the specifics of the participation of LVN Pictures, see Mike de Leon’s Last Look Back (Contra Mundum Publishing, 2022). I also wrote, as far as I know, the first scholarly attempt to recuperate the filmmaker in “A Missing Installation in the Philippine Pantheon: Gregorio ‘Yoyong’ Fernandez (1904–1973)” in Pelikula: A Journal of Philippine Cinema and Moving Image, issue 9 (2024), pp. 24–35; I initially drafted and continually revised a preprint version of this article on Amauteurish, my academic website.

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