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Anak Dalita
English Translation: Child of Sorrow
English Title: The Ruins
Year of Release: 1956 / B&W
Director: Lamberto V. Avellana
Screenwriter: Rolf Bayer
Producer: LVN Pictures
Cast: Rosa Rosal, Tony Santos, Joseph de Cordova, Vic Silayan, Vic Bacani, Leroy Salvador, Rosa Aguirre, Oscar Keesee, Alfonso Carvajal, Johnny Reyes, Eddie Rodriguez, Arturo Moran
Vic comes home from the Korean War and finds that his mother is not only on the verge of death, but has also been living in the ruins of old Intramuros with nightclub hostess Cita. After his mother dies, he moves in with Cita but they realize that money is hard to come by. Driven by desperation, Vic makes choices that will test his love for Cita and his resolve for a better life.
The first triumphant use of neorealism in Philippine cinema is a testament to an impoverished past—that of World War II devastation—that the country managed to vanquish, only to see it return over and over with increasing regularity, culminating in what has been described by political expert Walden Bello as “the anti-development state” in his eponymously titled 2005 volume. In the context of Cold-War conservatism, when government and religious leaders sought to infantilize the public with wholesome father-knows-best material, Anak Dalita made a then-daring decision to uphold as its heroes a highly unlikely pair, a Korean-War veteran turned petty criminal and a prostitute seeking to turn over a new leaf. To attain a hopeful resolution, the narrative requires the conventional intervention of an authoritarian figure, a decorous priest, to help the duo find the light of personal redemption as well as convince slum dwellers to give up their homestead claims. Consistently high-caliber performances nevertheless provide the crucial component of credibility, with star turns by its charismatically hard-edged lead performers.
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Sarjan Hassan
English Title: Sergeant Hassan
Language: Malay
Additional Languages: Japanese, English
Year of Release: 1958 / B&W
Director: Lamberto V. Avellana
Screenwriter: P. Ramlee
(From a story by Ralph Modder)
Producer: Malay Film Productions Ltd.
Cast: P. Ramlee, Sa’adiah, Jins Shamsuddin, Salleh Kamil, John Gray, David Downe, Daeng Idris, Aini Jasmin, Nyong Ismail, Leng Hussein, Omar Rojik, Pon M.R., S. Shamsudin, Rashid M.R., M. Raffee, Adek Ja’afar, Kemat Hassan, Habibah Harun, Omar Suwita, Zainol Bakar, Ali P.G.
Before his father dies, Hassan is entrusted to the family of his father’s friend. Unfortunately, his adoptive brother Ajis resents the newcomer and conspires with Buang to bully Hassan. Their friend Salmah defends Hassan although the latter refuses to fight back. When they grow up, Ajis leaves for military training while Hassan is left behind to look after the family. Hassan writes his adoptive father an apology to be able to train as well, upon which the Japanese declare war. Buang arranges with the invaders to volunteer his services as informant and uses his newfound authority to pressure Salmah to marry him. Salmah refuses, since she has fallen for Hassan. But the unit that Hassan and Ajis joined, along with their American commander, falls into enemy hands. Buang arranges for Ajis to be brought to Malacca for execution, informing Salmah that only their marriage will save her brother. Hassan hears about a British-led guerrilla force and realizes that he has to take charge of his fate as well as those of the family and townsfolk that he learned to value as his own.
To celebrate its independence in 1957, the then-Federation of Malaya, with Run Run Shaw producing, conscripted Lamberto V. Avellana to direct a biographical feature on one of the country’s World War II heroes, Hassan bin Haji Othman. As a film event, Sarjan Hassan’s subject is potentially complex and controversial: awarded a Military Medal by Queen Elizabeth, Othman later became known (and feared) as an anti-Communist crusader. The film itself, however, has been celebrated in Malaysia through the decades, primarily because of the person regarded as the country’s superstar, P. Ramlee. One claim is that when Avellana was unable to finish the film, Ramlee took over. His performance as Sergeant Hassan betokens an accomplished performer’s easy handling of a role steeped in dramatic heroism—small wonder that he’d been better known for film comedies and musicals.[1] The narrative itself, again owing to Ramlee, is also spared Avellana’s usual social conservatism. The tension between Avellana’s famed expertise at staging epic material and Ramlee’s purveyance of his people’s decent charms results in one of the more fascinating war films that our filmmakers had the good fortune to be associated with.
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Nick Joaquin’s A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino
Alternate Title: A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino
Language: English
Additional Language: Spanish
Year of Release: 1965 / B&W
Director: Lamberto V. Avellana
Screenwriters: Donato Valentin & Trinidad Reyes
(From the play A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino: An Elegy in Three Scenes by Nick Joaquin)
Producers: Diadem Pictures & Cinema Artists
Cast: Daisy H. Avellana, Naty Crame-Rogers, Conrad Parham, Vic Silayan, Sarah K. Joaquin, Nick Agudo, Pianing Vidal, Koko Trinidad, Oscar Keesee, Veronica Palileo, Nena Perez Rubio, Manny Ojeda, Rino Bermudez, Alfred X. Burgos, Nena Ledesma, Polly Anders, Miriam Jurado
In need of extra funds to maintain their house in Intramuros, the sisters Candida and Paula Marasigan take in a border, the caddishly handsome Tony Javier, also to be able to withstand the insistence of their other siblings to sell the property and live with them. When Bitoy Camacho, a long-unseen family friend, visits them one day, they’re delighted by the reminiscences he occasions but eventually figure out, when he admits to being a writer, that he’s really snooping around to be able to report on the painting that their father, Don Lorenzo, completed as his final masterpiece, titled “Un retrato del artista como Filipino” (also the Spanish name of the play and film). Tony himself also admits that, when he learned about the existence of the painting, he found an American willing to purchase it for a price that would allow Don Lorenzo and the sisters to live comfortably. But since the patriarch refuses to give up his house, Candida and Paula hang on to the painting to honor his wish. With World War II about to break out, everyone familiar with the family grows increasingly desperate in disposing of the house and selling the painting, with Tony figuring out a way to persuade the sisters using his charm.
The film adaptation of Nick Joaquin’s stage masterwork may require some degree of willingness to depart from realism, with what is essentially a staged production in which characters, even vaudeville performers, speak in English. To remark that it may be the most successful existing evidence of a Classical Hollywood achievement in the Philippines would therefore be not much of a compliment, although Joaquin’s text does sustain the cumulative power it more efficiently discloses onstage. What Joaquin instead achieves in A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino is an implicit critique of Americanization—ironic when considering his deployment of English. Joaquin’s detractors correctly point out that his ideological project relies on a dangerous capitulation to colonial nostalgia in preferring Old-World culture. Yet the other aspect of this critical process cannot be discounted: in providing a convincing deconstruction of US influence, he also effectively warns against an uncritical acceptance of other forms of foreign domination. Lamberto V. Avellana enables this reading via opening and closing voice-overs, purportedly from Bitoy Camacho, the least deluded member of the generation that Candida and Paula belong to. Beyond these admittedly dated issues, the film also endures as a sample of one of the spoken languages (the other being Spanish) that attempted to lay claim on Philippine cinema before Tagalog succeeded in ensconcing itself, with Cebuano being its only serious challenger.
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The Evil Within
Alternate Title: Passport to Danger
Language: English [dubbed]
Additional Language: Hindi
Year of Release: 1970
Director: Lamberto V. Avellana
Screenwriter: Rolf Bayer
Producers: Arbee Productions & Navketan Studios
Cast: Dev Anand, Kieu Chinh, Tita Muñoz, Vimal Ahuja, Henry Duval, Premnath Malhotra, Iftekhar, Zeenat Aman, Bipin Gupta, Manvendra Chitnis, Allen Fitzpatrick, Rod Perry, Jagdish Raj, M.B. Shetty, Kuljit Singh, Yog Raj, Akbar Bakshi, Dhannalal, Dharamvir, Henry Feist, Sudesh Issar, Fazal Khan, Ken Metcalfe, Joseph Zucchero, Lucita Soriano, Lena, Birbal, Sudesh, Radish Khan, R.B. Henni, Tony Lee, Barbara Allen, Vic Silayan, Kim Ramos
A violent agent called Fatman evades a series of arrest attempts in Hongkong by killing the people involved, but he’s unable to survive an assassination by the opium-smuggling syndicate to whom he offers his services. Superspy Dev Verma is assigned to bust the syndicate in the Golden Triangle, assisting Interpol agent Rod Stevens. They discover that Fatman’s death was part of a complex mesh of intrigue, involving the daughter of the handler, all the way up to Kamar Souria, a princess who lives in the desert. To get to her, Dev interrogates her brother’s lover, Amal, but then he discovers that her relationship with the princess transcends her lover’s ambition to wrest control of the smuggling operation.
Lamberto V. Avellana’s problematic stature as a local artist squarely in step with the demands of imperial and authoritarian regimes brings up the similar issue of collaboration raised by Gerardo de Leon’s acquiescence to the Japanese occupation’s film agency when it embarked on its big-budget propaganda project, albeit minus GDL’s subsequent progressive turn as well as the counter-reading instigated by the anti-American messaging of Dawn of Freedom (1944, codir. Abe Yutaka). Nevertheless, as a still critically capable practitioner, Avellana has managed to come up with works that enable contrarian readings, as evident in Petronilo Bn. Daroy’s appreciation of Anak Dalita (Child of Sorrow, 1956) in “Main Currents in the Filipino Cinema” (published March 23–29, 1976, in the Philippines Daily Express). The Evil Within has the same Cold War superspy configuration as the James Bond series, and indeed announced its intent to launch its lead actor as global heroic star in the mold of Hollywood’s cool, wisecracking, sexually confident studs. Pujita Guha’s article “Traversing The Evil Within (1970): Transnational Aspirations, Stardom, and Infrastructure in a Cold-War Asia,” published in the anthology Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India: Shooting Stars, Shifting Geographies, and Mutiplying Media (Routledge, 2021), tracks in expert historical detail how Dev Anand’s final attempt at breaking into Western film production, after an initially failed attempt in Ted Danielewski’s The Guide (1965), faltered just as badly this time around. Guha’s assertion, drawn from Jack Halberstam and inspired by Michel Foucault, that failure can be viewed as “the embodiment of defiance,” may be lost to readers unfamiliar with the ironic logic of screen cultural studies; the fact that TEW itself was never shown in India, released only in Pinas and possibly in a limited US run, further seals the negligence with which it has been regarded. Despite a number of inaccuracies in her evaluation of Avellana’s record, Guha also provides the reason for Indian censors’ disapproval of the film—i.e., its glamorization in effect of opium-smuggling activities. Yet the actual unnamed reason may have lain in the very factor that Anand could not overcome: he was outshone by the female cast that his character supposedly dominated and outwitted. The youngest, Zeenat Aman, was Indian and killed off too early in the plot; the other two were Vietnamese and Filipina, Kiểu Chinh and Tita Muñoz respectively, playing frenemies who become separately involved with Dev Verma (Anand’s character), but who turn out to be as much lovers as rivals. This was in accordance with reports pertaining to Olive Yang, a real-life opium warlord who was eventually captured, released, and lived to a ripe old age until her death in 2017. The fact that Avellana positioned lesbian desire front and center, with two attractive and well-matched performers, will surprise everyone (as it did me) who assumed he would resist the then-raging bomba film trend in his home country. To his credit, and despite the fate that befell TEW, he managed to embody his delight in cinematic spectacle with a rarely achieved smart and queenly alpha-female pair.
Note
[1] See Amir Muhammad’s “P. Ramlee, Superstar” in Moving Image Source, March 18, 2011, excerpted from Asia Laughs! A Survey of Asian Comedy Films, ed. Roger Garcia (Centro Espressioni Cinematografiche, 2011). Additional relevant material can be found in Lee Yow Chong and Candida Jau Emang’s “Selling the Past in Films: Shaw Brothers and the Japanese Occupation of Malaya,” in Jurnal Komunikasi—Malaysian Journal of Communication, vol. 32, no. 2, 2016, pp. 1-16.
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