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Amado Pagsanjan’s Asiong Salonga
Alternate Title: Asiong Salonga
Year of Release: 1961 / B&W
Director: Pablo Santiago
Screenwriter: Tommy C. David
From a story serialized in Bulaklak magazine by Amado Pagsanjan
Producer: Larry Santiago Productions
Cast: Joseph Estrada, Jose Padilla Jr., Yolanda Guevarra, Guia Gomez, Boy Francisco, Paquito Diaz, Vic Diaz, Vicente Liwanag, Dely Atay-Atayan, Jane Palomar, Nello Nayo, Francisco Cruz, Dencio Padilla, Arsenio Alonzo, Cleng-Cleng Diaz, Fred Ramirez, Bert Silva, Tony Santos
Nicasio Salonga, better known by his nickname Asiong, uses a combination of charm and propensity for violence to rise in the ranks of the most notorious gangs in the crime-ridden district of Tondo. Because of his notoriety, his elder brother has to give up his job as a police official while his mother dies during one of his incarcerations. He maintains a circle of mostly loyal followers and succeeds in courting Fidela and later convinces Emilia to be his mistress. A lesser-ranking hoodlum, Totoy Golem, starts out as a rival but eventually professes to be his friend and supporter while convincing Erning, one of Asiong’s malcontented and unruly recruits, to join his side.
Political democracy never wasted a bigger Philippine talent than it did Joseph Estrada. Newcomers to his screen record might be shocked to find, in the context of his era, a risk-taking performer with solid performative instincts with a willingness to depict the dregs of society—possibly the best we ever had in the action genre. His early starring roles, with Asiong Salonga comprising his star turn, were still free of the bad-boy mannerisms and intense-aspirated delivery that had already overtaken contemporaneous stars starting with Fernando Poe Jr. (The latter of course made his mark in other compensatory auteurist terms, starting with film production.) Erap’s later self-produced films took advantage of his rising political influence by focusing on personalities associated with the pre-1968 Communist armed movement, a productive mode that he gave up in exchange for the pursuit of presidential and local-government perks. The original cut of Asiong Salonga suffered from the excessive moralizing understandably imposed by society’s moral guardians, since the real-life model physically resembled Erap too closely and burned out far too quickly. Fortunately, the shortened version posted online by Solar Entertainment makes judicious use of fadeouts and a few jump cuts in the interest of cutting short several onscreen sermons and, in one case, a song number by Erap himself. The file still nears the two-hour mark anyway, an indicator of how incident-packed Salonga’s short life was (keep alert for Tony Santos’s reflexive cameo where he in effect passes on his bad-boy aura to Estrada via Salonga). The genre-studies principle that melodrama undergirds all the other genres, with the action movie as essentially melodrama for men, starts here before it proceeds to the rest of the the local action-film samples in the forthcoming decades.
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1—Pepeng Kaliwete
English Title: Left-Handed Pepe
Year of Release: 1982
Director: Pablo Santiago
Screenwriters: Fred Navarro & Alex M. Sunga
Based on a character created by Alex M. Sunga
Producer: FPJ Productions
Cast: Fernando Poe Jr., Marianne de la Riva, Paquito Diaz, Rodolfo “Boy” Garcia, Anita LInda, Ruel Vernal, Victor Bravo, Vic Varrion, Nello Nayo, Robert Rivera, Amay Bisaya, Ken Metcalf, Teody Belarmino, George Gyenes, Michael Pigar, Cesar Abejuela, Amy Anzures, Tony Carreon, Ernie David, Diog de Castro, Joe Estrada, Bert Garon, Eddie Gicoso, Romy Guarin, Benny May, Rony Montero, Bob Padilla, Wilson Red, Jimmy Reyes, Eddie Samonte, Thunder Stuntmen, Eddie Tuazon, Rudy Fernandez, Don Pepot
Pepe’s father plans to leave the hacienda in Del Pilar because of the owner’s avarice and cruelty, but gets gunned down in the presence of his wife and son. The owner entrusts Pepe to the care of Davis, a benign American caretaker who teaches Pepe how to clean and shoot a .45-caliber pistol. When Merill, the abusive American who killed Pepe’s father, brings over a female tenant to ravish, Pepe uses the pistol to warn him but winds up shooting Merill dead. Pepe and his mother flee to another town, where he grows up anonymously and acquires a reputation as a defender of the oppressed. His mother understands how he hankers to help the people in Del Pilar, so she tells him to do what his heart desires. Despite the scion of the hacienda owner still being as abusive as his father before him, the town mayor is genuinely people-oriented. Although presenting as a migrant worker, Pepe helps him get rid of corrupt police elements and expresses a desire to join the police force. The mayor instead appoints him chief, and he successfully woos Salud, the mayor’s niece; but when the landowner tries to win him over, Pepe declares himself on the side of the workers, earning the enmity of the haciendero.
2—Annie Sabungera
English Title: Annie the Cockfighter
Year of Release: 1982
Director: Pablo Santiago
Screenwriter: Tommy C. David
Producer: GPS Film Productions
Cast: Nora Aunor, Ace Vergel, Rey Valera, Marilou Bendigo, Nova Villa, Dencio Padilla, Chito Arceo, Amay Bisaya, Hero Bautista, Ramon D’Salva, Tony Santos, German Moreno, Tintoy, Dodong Gonzales, Protacio Dee, Angie Salinas, Richard King, Samson
Mang Intong has turned to gambling as a way of forgetting the sudden death of his wife. When he gets drunk, he loses his temper and beats up his daughter Annie, but expresses regret afterward. He teaches Annie the best way to raise gamecocks and she proves to be an adept trainee when she takes her father’s best rooster and wins a difficult round. Mang Intong’s excitement causes him to suffer a fatal heart attack in the cockpit. Like he did for his late wife, Annie devotes her life to cockfighting. Her father appears one night and tells her that he arranged to provide for her a sure winner. Following his instructions, she finds a new gamecock that speaks only to her, names him Samson, and sets out for Manila to try her luck. Her childhood friend, Domeng, carries a torch for her but has to stay behind to work. Annie’s triumph with Samson piques the interest of Randy, an apparently well-bred gentleman who’s really a henchman for a gambling lord. Randy’s boss takes an interest in Samson but Annie refuses to give up her father’s gift, so the boss asks Randy to help him trick Annie.
Although the nephew of one of the founders of Premiere Productions, Pablo Santiago succeeded in independent productions for his own outfit as well as for those of his cousins Cirio (famed for foreign coproductions) and Larry. More significantly, he specialized in projects that featured the biggest stars of their time—Fernando Poe Jr. and Joseph Estrada during the First Golden Age, and Nora Aunor and Vilma Santos during the Second. He might have been remembered for “developmentalist” projects such as Batingaw (Church Bell, 1974) or Kasal-Kasalan, Bahay-Bahayan (Playing Married, Playing House, 1979), or his later crossover assists between romantic-comedy and action performers; but in one propitious year he accepted assignments for Poe and Aunor that allowed him to foreground the skills and ease he accumulated in over a quarter-century of commercial practice. Pepeng Kaliwete had FPJ embarking on his usual role as champion of the oppressed, treading the same ground as the raved-over Sakada (Sugar-Plantation Migrant Workers, dir. Behn Cervantes, 1976). Its observations of backbreaking labor and dehumanizing treatment are on the mark, although certain concessions to the power structure, notably in depicting a sympathetic local-government official and a persecuted American, threaten to upend its leftist leanings. Fortunately, FPJ himself knew when he had to minimize his crowd-pleasing antics in order to allow the interests of the populace to be filtered through his persona, and comes close to violating the taboo against allowing his character to die, although only in a symbolic sense. Annie Sabungera is an even further throwback, to an era when fantastic developments were allowed to intervene in a lead character’s material predicaments. The real miracle lay in Aunor’s resolve to play the proceedings straight, layering her performance with the same set of superior performative skills that she brought to her prestige projects;[1] this had always been her approach throughout her career, but one only has to inspect any other local actor of equal or lesser status to find how exceptional her achievement was. The buildup to an unexpectedly devastating resolution, where social corruption prevails over supernatural powers, requires a complex of conflicting responses that would have defeated most capable actors. Aunor’s description of her fallow moments as a consequence of downgrading by film critics who should have known better, only revealed how impossible it was for them to fulfill their worst expectations of her. [Tech note: existing video transfers of Annie Sabungera suffer from an unacceptable cropping of the right portion of the screen, in addition to the usual degraded surface.]
Note
[1] A cockfight specialist who recollected the films he saw took exception with Annie Sabungera’s fantasy elements, but nevertheless observed how the film had “a considerable amount of sabong vocabulary employed as well as some handling and conditioning techniques”—see Rolando S. Luzong, “Finally, a New Sabong Movie in the Making,” Animal Scene Magazine (supplement of Manila Bulletin), March 2009 issue. The film referenced in the article title was Rozie Delgado & Miguel Kaimo’s Sabungero (The Cockfighter, 2009), although a more recent release, Bryan Kristoffer Brazil’s Lost Sabungeros (2024), has become an unusual cause célèbre because of its civic significance: produced by GMA Public Affairs, the documentary raised questions about the abduction and disappearance of thirty cockfighters whose interests conflicted with those of politically connected gambling lords. One final observation about the Pablo Santiago film, never made anywhere, might be historical in nature, inasmuch as the backstory of Annie’s father resembles the real-life narrative of Gregorio Fernandez, a major First Golden Age director-actor (also represented in Canon Decampment)—whose wife’s death apparently led to his abandonment of career and family, fostering a new vocation as cockfighter in his hometown of Lubao, Pampanga; see Joel David, “A Missing Installation in the Philippine Pantheon: Gregorio ‘Yoyong’ Fernandez (1904–1973),” Pelikula: A Journal of Philippine Cinema and Moving Image, vol. 9 (2024), pp. 24–35.
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