Canon Decampment: Efren Reyes

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Ang Daigdig Ko’y Ikaw

English Translation: My World Is You
Additional Languages: Hiligaynon, Cebuano
Year of Release: 1965 / B&W
Director: Efren Reyes
Screenwriter: Fred Navarro
From a story by Efren Reyes
Producer: FPJ Productions

Cast: Fernando Poe Jr., Susan Roces, Oscar Keesee, Lito Anzures, Victor Bravo, Pablo Virtuoso, Dencio Padilla, Vic Varrion, Mario Escudero, Rudy Meyer, Philip Coo, Marilou Murray, Esther Vizconde, Romy Nario, Resty Sandel, Angelo Buenaventura.

At the Manila Yacht Club, Don Larrazabal has asked his men to lock his daughter Vicky in the cabin of his vessel, to take her away from Daniel, the man she wants to marry. When they arrive at Matabungkay Beach in Batangas, however, they remain unaware that she jumped overboard and swam to shore. She finds a dilapidated cargo truck driven by Roman, who has stopped for lunch with his two employees. She steals their food and boards the open-air cargo section. Roman and his companions think that one of them has been sneezing, but when they stop they discover Vicky. She pleads with them to take her to Baguio, offering to help in their work and even drive the truck herself. Since her clothes are wet, they offer her Roman’s spare clothes while Roman later says he can provide her with work if she needs it. When her father and his men pass by in their car, the truck occupants hide her and deny they’ve seen her. But when the father finds out that Daniel has gone to Baguio, he and his men proceed to the summer capital, believing they might find Vicky there.

Male actors who became directors were such a guarantee of film quality that one or two overlooked names would not be such a big deal. (In a satisfying twist of fate, the country’s last excellent actor-director was a woman, Laurice Guillen.) As a performer, Efren Reyes also lingered in the shadow of Gerardo de Leon, another actor-director. Fortunately he made a number of films for yet another actor-director, Fernando Poe Jr., whose most significant contribution was … as producer. FPJ spent a major portion of his fortune on maintaining prints of his films, even those produced by others. He may have been artistically limited as a consequence of this commitment, but the rewards—the best video transfers of any official distributor in Philippine cinema, not to mention occasionally excellent titles not stored at the Singapore (now Asian) Film Archive, by directors who would have otherwise remained unrepresented—are available for anyone with a passing interest in local pop culture. Ang Daigdig Ko’y Ikaw acquired a patina of nostalgia for its distinction of being the first film where FPJ teamed up with Susan Roces, over a decade since their emergence as major stars of competing First Golden Age studios, when their respective personas were already fully formed. Not surprisingly, these factors, alongside Poe’s and Roces’s equally matched levels of charm and ability, enable ADKI to sustain more strongly than most other first-time star teamups. The film’s success is evidenced in several more of their costarred projects over the next couple of decades as the most enduring lead duo in local cinema, although Roces’s tradition-enforced inactivity after her marriage to Poe must be counted as a regrettable loss, considering the superiority of her skills set relative to most of her star-level contemporaries. Their status as film royalty also contributed to a certain anxiety over the presumably dismissive response to their first project together: subsequent Roces-Poe movies were marked by a striving for allegorical serviceability, seemingly apologetic over the excessive pleasures provided by ADKI, which was supposedly further compromised by several moments reminiscent of its obvious source of inspiration, Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934). Yet ADKI does not aim to surpass the Capra, providing instead a credibly indigenous counterpart. It elects to resolve as an open tribute to another local film, outstanding but now lost: Cesar Amigo’s Sa Atin ang Daigdig (The World Is Ours, 1963)[1]—proof that it had not just its heart in the right place, but also its feet on the right turf.

Note

[1] Spoiler alert: Both Ang Daigdig Ko’y Ikaw and Sa Atin ang Daigdig function as romantic comedies; the former is expanded by scope and locale in constituting for the most part a road trip, but the latter manages to focus more effectively on class differences. One might remark that the references to It Happened One Night diffuse the concentration of ADKI, but then again, social commentary is not its primary purpose. The parallels with SAD might be suggested by the commonality of the Filipino word for “world” in their titles, but the ending of ADKI dispels any doubt when it mounts a variation on the climax of SAD, where the central pair, played by Robert Arevalo and Nida Blanca, arrive at an understanding of their possibly irresolvable differences and the less-privileged Blanca character walks away from Arevalo, toward the camera; when Arevalo realizes he wishes to work out their relationship and calls to her, she continues advancing but this time with a knowing smile as he starts running, upon which the film ends. Film critic and scriptwriter (and National Artist for Theater and Literature) Rolando S. Tinio went on record to describe SAD as the best Filipino film he had ever seen, circa the early 1980s; I had included it as one of two black-and-white titles, along with Gregorio Fernandez’s Malvarosa (1958), in my top-ten canon—see Joel David and Melanie Joy C. Garduño, “The Ten Best Filipino Films Ever Made,” National Midweek (July 4, 1990), pp. 125–36, rpt. in Fields of Vision: The Digital Edition (Amauteurish Publishing, 2014), posted online. A local article that interrogates instances of film appropriations is “Imitation and Indigenization in Melodramas in the Late 1950s,” Huwaran/Hulmahan Atbp.: The Film Writings of Johven Velasco (University of the Philippines Press, 2009), pp. 113–24. For a useful recent discussion that teases out the complexities of cross-cultural appropriation from relatively marginal locales to the center, see Alex Taek-Gwang Lee’s “From Porcelain to Chips: A Genealogy of Global Technology and Capitalism,” Everyday Analysis (August 29, 2025), posted online.

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