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T-Bird at Ako
English Translation: Lesbian and I
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1982
Director: Danny L. Zialcita
Screenwriter: Portia Ilagan
Producer: Film Ventures
Cast: Vilma Santos, Nora Aunor, Suzanne Gonzales, Dindo Fernando, Tommy Abuel, Odette Khan, Leila Hermosa, Johnny Wilson, Dick Israel, Rosemarie Gil, Subas Herrero, Liza Lorena, Alvin Enriquez, Baby Delgado, Johnny Vicar, Rustica Carpio, Anita Linda
Bar dancer Isabel is charged with homicide after killing a man who tried to rape her. Lesbian lawyer Sylvia offers to represent her for free. But while their relationship as client and counsel starts off as professional, things change when Sylvia begins to have feelings for Isabel. As lust mixes with legal concerns, they soon realize that winning their case will be a much more complicated matter.
The next major showdown between the country’s top stars since Ishmael Bernal’s Ikaw Ay Akin four years earlier confirmed that the tables between them had definitely turned. Vilma Santos could still play coquettish and sensuous more convincingly than most “bold” stars of the time, but Nora Aunor could summon conflictive inner lives—lonely, lustful, and Sapphic while being outwardly contented, principled, and sexually disinterested—like only few veteran performers could pull off. Danny L. Zialcita had at least two potentially superior entries: Hindi sa Iyo ang Mundo, Baby Porcuna (The World Is Not Yours, Baby Porcuna), now lost, from 1978; and Ikaw at ang Gabi (You and the Night), somewhat overrated, a year later. He has also become a film-buff favorite for a long list of well-received loquacious melodramas and sex comedies, including Eddie Garcia’s most successful dirty-old-man “Manóy” vehicles. T-Bird at Ako falls squarely between his “quality” and “commercial” attempts, exhibiting the best, as well as the worst, of both options, and intensifying the fireworks between two talents whose histrionic duels would persist into the next millennium.
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Palabra de Honor
English Translation: Word of Honor
English Title: On My Honor
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1983
Director: Danny L. Zialcita
Screenwriter: Danny L. Zialcita (as Mike Vergara)[1]
Producer: Viva Films
Cast: Eddie Garcia, Hilda Koronel, Elizabeth Oropesa, Beth Bautista, Amy Austria, Jackie Lou Blanco, Gloria Diaz, Dindo Fernando, Ronaldo Valdez, Tommy Abuel, Mark Gil, Suzanne Gonzales, Virginia Montes, Mario Escudero, Augusto Victa, Tony Angeles, Bert Asuncion, Lucy Quinto, Rolly Papasin, Bert Dizon, Lilian Laing, Christian Espiritu, Josie Tagle
The elderly widower Don Adolfo’s family and employees squabble over their share of wealth while making sure, as he does, to claim their objects of pleasure, illicitly if necessary. His daughter Cristy endures a loveless marriage with David but gets pregnant from her affair with Louie, who administers the Don’s educational institution. Louie’s wife Olivia objects to their new hire, an instructor with a liberal-activist background, incurring the wrath of the instructor’s wife. David meanwhile decides to blackmail Louie so he can start anew with Elma, whose husband Arthur, a lawyer for the school, wishes to collect on the promise he extracted from the instructor’s wife in exchange for his support. Don Adolfo finds comfort in his fiancée Victoria, but his possessive daughter tries to dig up dirt so she won’t have to lose her father.
After several attempts at sex comedies, Danny L. Zialcita welded his immensely profitable approach to a small-town family saga and triumphed with an offbeat, sophisticated entry. The bedroom-to-boardroom roundelay avoids redundancies by adopting a wide variety of class and gender perspectives, and reserves the juiciest revelations toward the end. With the Marcos Sr. authoritarian system still firmly in place, the film could casually portray sexist acts, but it mitigates these blunders with humor and strong-women characterization (including a distaff brawl that’s funny and shocking in equal measure). Its final twist depicts how the titular word of honor gets qualified by several levels of irony; the complaint of most know-it-all commentators at the time that these types of films don’t possess any understanding of the upper-class lifestyle they exploit reflects on their critical limitations. Palabra de Honor sets out to disparage, not document, its nominal heroes—and succeeds, to the lasting benefit of Pinas pop culture.
Note
[1] For Palabra de Honor and two succeeding films, Danny L. Zialcita used a name that did not have any other Philippine film credit before or after. Some posters and publicity materials, however, listed him as writer. Film archivist and researcher Monchito Nocon pointed out in a private exchange (Facebook Messenger, January 28, 2025) that “Mike Vergara is Danny’s son. His mom, Danny’s wife, was Leonor Vergara. Ergo, that’s really just Danny using another person’s name” inasmuch as the real-life Michael Vergara Zialcita, who’d appeared in some of his father’s previous films, would still have been a preteen at the time. Several possible reasons may have accounted for Zialcita’s decision. Relevant to film criticism would have been the shrill denunciations by members of the critics’ award-giving group for his alleged plagiarism of fairly accessible Western films samples. This behavior, premised on an “originality as [postcolonial] vengeance” slogan that originated in the national university, indicates an unexamined variation of colonial mentality where local authors and artists are expected to restrict themselves in realms of practice that Westerners would describe as tribute or homage if it occurred among themselves.
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