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Geron Busabos: Ang Batang Quiapo

English Translation: Geron the Tramp: The Quiapo Kid
English Title: Geron the Tramp
Year of Release: 1964 / B&W
Director: Cesar Gallardo
Screenwriter: Augusto Buenaventura
Producer: Emar Pictures

Cast: Joseph Estrada, Imelda Ilanan, Oscar Roncal, Vic Andaya, Bebong Osorio, Avel Morado, Boy Alvarez

Geron is known for defending his fellow slum dwellers of Quiapo. But this earns the ire of a gang that mulcts the people of the area. Along the way, Geron befriends the hustler Digno and street kid Beto and tries to win the love of sampaguita [jasmine] vendor Nena. But when Digno’s shady past is revealed, he joins the locally feared gang and they hatch a plot that puts Geron’s life at stake.

Like, yet unlike, Fernando Poe Jr., disgraced former President Joseph Estrada also possesses his own set of unfulfilled promises that might have affirmed his artistic reputation if he had not allowed politics to intervene in his film career. Geron Busabos and the more pointed, though also more deeply flawed, Asiong Salonga (1961, dir. Pablo Santiago) demonstrate why Erap and Da King functioned as yin and yang to each other: unlike FPJ, Estrada started out as movie villain and, in what was then a star-text innovation, clambered up the ladder to lead roles by maintaining, rather than jettisoning, his bad-guy persona. Through most of his career he remained resistant to the heroic gentrification that Poe came to prefer, and the fact that his real-life stint as villainous Chief Executive reflected his fictional persona turned out to be a disappointment not just for his film stature, but for his historical legacy as well. Though less moralistic than Asiong Salonga, Geron Busabos plays safer by stressing from the beginning the lead character’s occasionally misperceived obeisance to law and order; what distinguishes the film from a long list of Pinoy noirs is in its well-observed distillation of Quiapo-district archetypes. Estrada’s insistent and eloquent championing of society’s underdogs, coupled—at least in his early breakout films—with finely honed delivery, makes understandable how he managed to capture the imagination of the widest segment of the voting public in any Philippine presidential election.

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Biyaya ng Lupa

English Title: Blessings of the Land
Alternate English Title: Bounty of the Earth
Year of Release: 1959 / B&W
Director: Manuel Silos
Screenwriters: Celso Al. Carunungan & Pablo Naval
Producer: LVN Pictures

Cast: Rosa Rosal, Tony Santos, Joseph de Cordova, Leroy Salvador, Carlos Padilla Jr., Marita Zobel, Danilo Jurado, Carmencita Abad

Jose, Maria, and their four children live on a lanzones orchard. All is well until the arrival of Bruno, who resorts to villainy after his pursuit of a new wife was hampered by Jose. To get even, Bruno rapes Jose’s daughter. When Jose seeks revenge, he is killed by Bruno. For Maria, this only marks the beginning of the challenges she has to face while sustaining her family and the orchard.

The past tends to be remembered as idyllic, and this film reinforces that impression in several ways: by being set on a modest lanzones plantation (eyed by a covetous wealthy neighbor), upholding family values and the quiet dignity of rural folk, and emphasizing the indispensability of the bayanihan [cooperational] spirit to communal order and productivity. Even the elements incidental to the narrative—its use of black and white, its half-century vintage, its now-elderly cast—provide a final veneer of nostalgia. Although later filmmakers, notably Lino Brocka, managed to make some of their movie villains understandable, if not sympathetic, Biyaya ng Lupa can nevertheless defend its sole shortcoming, the demonization of the taong-labas or outsider, as less a matter of malice than an act of naïveté.

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Sino ang Maysala?

English Translation: Who Is at Fault?
Year of Release: 1957 / B&W
Director: Armando Garces
Screenwriters: Luciano B. Carlos & Armando Galauran
(Based on the komiks by Fausto Galauran)
Producer: Sampaguita Pictures

Cast: Rogelio de la Rosa, Gloria Romero, Paraluman, Ric Rodrigo, Lolita Rodriguez, Luis Gonzales, Rosa Mia, Susan Roces, Romeo Vasquez

A fairly wealthy family’s three daughters and only son revel in their material comforts—clothes, jewelry, cars, lovers—until one wild party night, when their father commits suicide. When they discover that their fortune is all gone, the daughters scramble to maintain as much of their lifestyle as they could salvage. Carmen, the eldest, administers the family’s finances and resumes her romance with a formerly impoverished but now-rich suitor, who already happens to be married; Gloria, abandoned by her beau, resolves to focus on her career; Lolita indulges in relationships that she refuses to take seriously. Their youngest brother, Bobby, starts acting out and goes on trial for participating in criminal activity, causing the family to arrive at a reckoning of their transgressions for his sake.

One of the problems in film evaluation still plaguing unreflective academically trained commentators up to the present is the valorization of politicized material invested with the discipline of classical unities, dramatic logic, and Western performative reserve. Which is why works like Sino ang Maysala? get overlooked by critics and scholars except for seriously neglected practitioners like the late Johven Velasco. Not only do the characters’ concerns remain resolutely domestic and (predictably) increasingly melodramatic, the characters themselves are named after the actors who play them; in the case of Paraluman, her character is called “Carmen” because the original performer was supposed to be Carmen Rosales. The arrangement contributed significantly to the film’s popular appeal when “Bobby” Vasquez lived out his bad-boy behavior the way his fictional version did. Yet Sino ang Maysala? provided more than just motives for its characters’ actions. The sisters’ survival strategies may have seemed morally unacceptable during their time, but anyone who returns for another viewing will realize that women who take stock of their situation and determine their own future paths (as our very own mostly female Overseas Filipino Workers regularly do) will be preferable to the spoiled spendthrifts that their characters had been at the start. The accumulated effect on Bobby of the decline in their social stature occasions a collective reflection that could have prevented the initial tragedy that befell their father if they had had enough experience of pain and suffering to be able to recognize his situation in time to save him. Hence the judge’s climactic sermon actually functions semi-ironically, the way that Sino ang Maysala? does in Philippine film history. Velasco points out how the film provides a local counterpart to the universally popular (though similarly belatedly appreciated) Douglas Sirk melodramas of Classical Hollywood, but claims as well that the lost-generation psychological dramas of Nicholas Ray and Elia Kazan were probably just as influential. These are worthy examples for any film product to be compared with, but the best part about Sino ang Maysala? is that it set out to provide grown-up popular entertainment and made sure that it fulfilled that mission well, before everything else.

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Mga Ligaw na Bulaklak

English Title: Wild Flowers
Year of Release: 1957 / B&W
Director: Tony Cayado
Screenwriters: Medy Tarnate & Emmanuel Borlaza
(Adapted from the serialized komiks by Carlos Gonda)
Producer: Sampaguita Pictures

Cast: Daisy Romualdez, Susan Roces, Romeo Vasquez, Tony Marzan, Bella Flores, Eddie Garcia, Marlene Dauden

Cora is lured by a drug syndicate after she encounters a glamorous crook, Greta. Conrado is also recruited by Greta and discovers that his boss, Big Boy, wants him to attract more female patrons to their gang’s smuggled opium. But as the authorities get closer to cracking down on the syndicate, Cora’s life is imperilled while Conrado begins to plot a takeover of Big Boy’s gang.

Film noir is the style that initially lends cover, in a manner of speaking, to this tale of moral corruption in the big city; eventually the noir element takes over everything and lends a solemn aura to the star-oriented house image of Sampaguita Pictures, including the narrative’s ingénue, played by the then-barely legal Susan Roces. The sight of the wholesome, winsome teen actress descending into an underworld of gangsters and sex workers eventually enabled her to “stretch” her persona from young-idol vehicles to drama and horror, setting a template that her contemporaries and successors have since been able to benefit from. Tony Cayado’s smart, confident direction of material adapted from a then-disreputable source, komiks literature, similarly pointed the way for successive generations seeking a balance between pulp pleasure and social discourse. Best of all, the expected antagonist in the virgin-vs.-whore dichotomy, depicted by Bella Flores with her trademark voluptuous swagger, turns out to be strong-woman enough to take the initiative in delivering our innocent from the certain calamity awaiting her.

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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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Kontrabando

English Title: Contraband
Year of Release: 1950 / B&W
Director: Gregorio Fernandez
Screenwriter: Armando Garces
(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 questions 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 welcome 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 [as Dr. 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

[Note: spoilers provided] 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 [as Dr. 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),[2] 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 [as Dr. 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.

Notes

[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, after initially drafting and continually revising a preprint version on Amauteurish, my academic website.

[2] The possibility of scandal would now be entirely circumstantial, considering the circumspection attendant to early Cold War culture. Nevertheless the prospects are compelling: Fernandez’s wife Maria Paz, younger sister of prominent actors Carlos and José “Pempe” Jr., died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound on October 8, 1957, with their young son Rudy discovering her body; as in the case of Mizoguchi Kenji, though from vastly differing conditions, Fernandez’s LVN films exhibited fierce critiques of patriarchy afterward. I submit that possible factors may be adduced from Fernandez’s output that build up toward this incident, though I can only maintain that these will be speculative at best: with Higit sa Lahat (1955), as an example, he not only reverted to using the title of “Dr.” though his degree was in dental medicine, but also assumed scriptwriting responsibility–in which he indisputably also excelled. Three of his films during this period featured a performer exceptional for her performative skill and onscreen magnetism, but who, like Fernandez, largely disappeared from public life afterward. His cessation of film activity did not stop the press from occasionally looking him up as well as from a Lubao, Pampanga townmate prevailing on him to help his presidential re-election campaign by directing a biographical movie, but he had largely retreated by then not just from professional colleagues but also from his immediate family, earning a local reputation as an outstanding cockfighter in his distant provincial dwelling.

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Jack en Jill

English Translation: Jack and Jill
Year of Release: 1954 / B&W
Director: Mar S. Torres
Screenwriter: Luciano B. Carlos
(Adapted from the serialized komiks novel of the same name by Mars Ravelo)
Producer: Sampaguita Pictures

Cast: Lolita Rodriguez, Dolphy, Rogelio de la Rosa, Matimtiman Cruz, Jose de Villa, Horacio Morelos, Etang Discher, Luis Gonzales, Bella Flores, Bruno Punzalan

Tomboyish Luisa and cross-dressing Gorio are the children of Ambo, a chauffeur for a rich couple and their son, Gardo. When Ambo gets sick, Luisa takes over his job by pretending to be a boy. Later, Gorio is adopted by Gardo’s parents when they mistake him for a girl. As the siblings get into all sorts of high jinks, the arrival of Gardo’s ladylove complicates matters even further.

Dolphy has always been a difficult figure to revaluate. The strategies he used to attain respectability did not permit much creative leeway, so his innovations as comedian generally tended to observe the limits expected of wholesome family fare. Several of his collaborations with Luciano B. Carlos, another too-eager-to-please major talent, hold up well as pleasant diversions, particularly during the libertarian bomba [soft-core] period of the early 1970s. Among his sex-themed comedies, the ones where he toyed with the concept of masculinity have provided a legacy that several later generations of comedians were able to draw from.[1] Mar S. Torres’s Jack en Jill, for all its dated assumptions, including its problematic misogyny, marks the moment when the figures of the so-called inverts (effeminate male and masculine female), though prevented from exhibiting same-sex desire and falsely provided with the last-minute discovery of their heterosexual tendencies, were foregrounded and set on a quite-lengthy journey to social acceptability.

Note

[1] A later Sampaguita Pictures production, Kaming mga Talyada (We Who Are Sexy) from 1962, emblematizes a far more complicated discourse, although its problematic nature makes it too unwieldy to enshrine in the present canon list. Directed by Tony Cayado, it features seven sissy men, desired by seven young women but resistant to harsh military discipline by their absentee father, whose “conversion” into the straight and narrow is expedited when they are deployed to Mindanao and have to suppress an Islamic uprising. The film’s selling point was the series of nightclub performances in Manila of Christine Jorgensen, an American inaccurately billed as the first postoperative transgender woman. The essential text that teases out these issues is Susan Stryker’s “We Who Are Sexy: Christine Jorgensen’s Transsexual Whiteness in the Postcolonial Philippines,” Social Semiotics, vol. 19, no. 1 (March 2009), pp. 79–91, DOI:10.1080/10350330802655551.

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Genghis Khan

Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1950 / B&W
Director: Manuel Conde [credited to Lou Salvador]
Screenwriters: Manuel Conde & Carlos V. Francisco
(English narration written by James Agee & read by John Storm)
Producer: MC Productions

Cast: Manuel Conde, Elvira Reyes, Inday Jalandoni, Jose Villafranca, Lou Salvador, Africa de la Rosa, Darmo Acosta, Juan Monteiro, Andres Centenera, Ric Bustamante, Ely Nakpil, Leon Lizares, Tony Cruz

Temujin and his fellow Mongol tribespeople are attacked by a rival tribe led by Burchou. He is soon captured but manages to escape. Upon returning to his village, he learns that his father was killed by Burchou’s men. In his quest for vengeance, he and his army bring down his enemy’s camp. But when he meets Burchou’s daughter, Lei Hai, Temujin’s resolve is put to the test.

As a then-prosperous US-aligned neocolonial entity during the Cold War, the Philippines could presume to appropriate and spoof, however good-naturedly, another country’s highly cherished historical figure—something it may never be able to do again today—and garner accolades in the process. Those fortunate enough to have attended any of the last few screenings of Manuel Conde’s musical comedies will be able to aver that his true genius lay in contemporary satire. To Genghis Khan’s advantage, it manifests his capacity for razor-sharp social commentary dispensed with madcap humor, bridging both the meaningful ebullience of Bahala Na (Come What May, 1957) and the caustic critiques of his long-running also-lost Juan Tamad (Lazy Juan) series (1947, 1948, 1959, 1960, 1963).[1] The original Genghis Khan print, presumed gone for good, ran for much longer than the hour-and-a-half version that was dubbed in English and sent to the Berlin International Film Festival. As a measure of Conde’s achievement, Howard Hughes subsequently produced Hollywood’s own Genghis Khan version, Dick Powell’s The Conqueror (1956), featuring an all-American icon, John Wayne; the movie wound up on a canon listing of its own—Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss’s The Fifty Worst Films of All Time (And How They Got That Way) (Popular Library, 1978).

Note

[1] Some of the final screenings of still-available Manuel Conde musicals were for the one-shot Focus on Filipino Films module of the 1983 edition of the Manila International Film Festival (where I’d been a technical assistant), including Ikaw Kasi (You’re the Cause, 1955) and Basta Ikaw (As Long as It’s You, 1957); both were ironically earlier made than Bahala Na, with the former in a monochrome print although it was also supposedly processed in Eastmancolor. While The Conqueror (1956), the US Genghis Khan counterpart, is generally regarded with derision, mention must also be made that the cast and crew suffered from nearly twice the normal incidence of cancer, with director Dick Powell and actors John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, Pedro Armendáriz, and Lee Van Cleef (not all of them smokers) dying from it. Although the federal government announced that their film locale, downwind from a then-still-active nuclear testing site, was safe from radioactive fallout, the fact that even family and guests who visited the production were also subsequently diagnosed with various forms of the disease strongly suggests that an epidemic of illness befell the production. (See Rory Carroll, “Hollywood and the Downwinders Still Grapple with Nuclear Fallout,” The Guardian, June 6, 2015.)

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Sisa

Additional Language: Spanish
Year of Release: 1951 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon
Screenwriter: Teodorico C. Santos
(Based on the title character created by José Rizal)
Producer: Premiere Productions

Cast: Anita Linda, Reynaldo Dante, Eduardo del Mar, Eddie Infante, Naty Rubi, Tony Tolman, Pancho Pelagio

Sisa’s life takes an unfortunate turn after her husband is wrongfully jailed. To make matters worse, her sons—altar boys Basilio and Crispin—are falsely accused of stealing from their local church by the head sacristan. The two are severely punished and, although Basilio escapes, Crispin is killed. As Sisa looks for her children, her search leads to one ordeal after another.

How aware was José Rizal that, in fleshing out the narrative of a native woman forced to endure unbearable suffering and loss by all manner of men—from her abusive husband to colonial soldiery, officials, and clerics—he was providing an iconic representation of his own country that would have prevailed into the new millennium? Composited from the experiences of the author’s real-life acquaintances, including his own mother, Sisa-as-character affirms a protofeminist strain usually overlooked in appreciations of Rizal’s novels. Anita Linda, herself a politicized celebrity who got blacklisted at one point for her pro-labor activities, embodied the role so completely that it became the gold standard for outstanding performance for several decades afterward. As developed by Gerardo de Leon and Teodorico C. Santos, the handling of Rizal’s Sisa turned out to be so overpowering and self-contained that even a decade later, when de Leon subsequently attempted an adaptation of the source novel, Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not, 1961), the result paled in comparison.[1] The reason that Sisa succeeds where adaptations of the Noli have tended to flounder is because of its unqualified and unrelenting critique of patriarchy, in all its naked, malignant prevalence, in the de Leon film.

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Dyesebel

Years of Release: 1953 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon
Screenwriter: Pierre L. Salas
(Adapted from Mars Ravelo’s komiks series)
Producer: Manuel Vistan Jr. Productions

Cast: Edna Luna, Jaime de la Rosa, Carol Varga, Fernando Royo, Etang Discher, Max Alvarado, Vicente Madrigal, Mary Williams, Nello Nayo, Luis San Juan, Neonita Bona, Paquito Salcedo, Lito Ansurez, Jesus Lapid, Isa Rino, Belen Campillos, Jose Buencamino, Nieves Abrera Anita Hanna, Loudes Galicia

[Note: spoilers provided] Dyesebel, who is born with a fishtail, is raised by her parents away from civilization to avoid persecution. Diangga, a benign sea-witch, provides her with the ability to breathe underwater like regular merfolk. When she ventures on a beach that she thought was abandoned, she gains the attention of Fredo, who falls in love with her. Fredo’s ex-girlfriend Betty gets wind of his new flame and discovers her mercreature condition. Still in love with Fredo, Betty schemes with conniving henchmen to abduct Dyesebel and banish her to a circus, where she becomes a sideshow attraction. Fredo sees the circus announcement in a newspaper and rescues her, but he is overpowered by Betty’s goons. He throws Dysebel in the sea, where Diangga perishes in acquiring an amulet for her. When Dysebel reaches shore, Betty espies her and sees the mermaid use the amulet to acquire human legs. Impressed by its ability to endow Dyesebel with perfection, Betty steals the amulet and rubs it like Dyesebel did, but discovers her legs have turned into a fishtail. Fredo and Dyesebel reunite and wed.

Mythical characters, whatever their origin, should all be so lucky as to be launched by the most gifted visual stylist among all Filipino filmmakers. In fact the original Dyesebel and its sequel (Anak ni Dyesebel or Child of Dyesebel, 1964)—both recently rediscovered after having been officially declared lost—had an element that the subsequent versions could already take for granted, but which was then unthinkable for a children’s fantasy: a reference to, and constant awareness of, the mermaid’s sexual difference. And in stark contrast with Hans Christian Andersen’s “Den lille havfrue (The Little Mermaid),” the Dyesebel character has no claim to royalty, whether undersea or on land, and gets spared the fairy tale’s cornball metaphysical closure, where the lead character sacrifices herself for love and earns the right to ultimately earn a soul. Our heroine fights for her heart’s desire although she understandably has to be discreet about it, and endures the several indignities her socially—and anatomically—advantaged rival visits on her. Small wonder that the descriptive term for her kind, sirena, eventually became synonymous with queer subjects—and as if to goad along this interpretation, Gerardo de Leon mischievously makes sure to depict the process of mer-transformation as a sight that never fails to freak out “normal” citizens.[2]

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Pedro Penduko

Years of Release: 1954 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon
Screenwriter: Ding M. de Jesus
(From the komiks series by Francisco V. Coching, as serialized in Liwayway)
Producers: People’s Pictures & Premiere Productions

Cast: Efren Reyes, Edna Luna, Lopito, Ramon d’Salva, Ruben Rustia, Lito Anzures, Nello Nayo, Paquito Salcedo, Purita Alma, Dely Atay-Atayan, Felisa Salcedo, Venchito Galvez, Max Alvarado, Juanito Lindo, Francisco Cruz, Francisco Martin, Tony Palomer, Jose Monasterial, Bino Garcia, Benny Panganiban, Onching Balibol, Nina Morales, Renato Robles

Pedro Penduko, a rural layabout, is goaded by his hunchback pal Terio to assist the limp Amparo, convincing him by saying she might offer them rice cakes. When Tony, a rich suitor, tells them to scram, Terio quarrels with him so Pedro has to help out. Marina, an heiress for whom Terio and Amparo work as househelp, invites Pedro to her welcome party celebrating her return from the US. Pedro’s father meantime promises his son an amulet that will protect him from harm, if Pedro agrees to bathe and court Amparo. Marina though has set her sights on Pedro and maltreats Amparo as her rival, further aggravating Tony’s rivalry. Their small-town concerns are brought to a head when Tirong, a bandit, kills Marina’s father and kidnaps Amparo, challenging Pedro to a duel if he wants to win the latter’s freedom.

In contrast with the previous year’s Dyesebel, Pedro Penduko, another of Gerardo de Leon’s komiks adaptations, has its soundtrack intact, although in unfortunately degraded video format. All to the best for Pinas cultural interests, since Francisco V. Coching’s material operates on a different plane in relation to literary artists of his era. (For a more straightforward treatment of another of his stories, see Conrado Conde’s Talipandas or Traitor, from 1958.) Even from among contemporary comic heroes, one would be hard-put to find someone who not only prefers to laze around but also whose body odor becomes his defining social marker, not to mention his preference for physically disabled chums. The psychoanalytic implications only intensify even as the characters are able to work through some of their prior hindrances, resulting in the best kind of comic situation: one where laughter is short-circuited by tragic backstories and where the requisite happy endings are well-earned. De Leon mounts an entire slew of contrarian readings by casting the agential roles against type: when hefty action star Efren Reyes in the amusingly harmless title role confronts the benign and contemplative Ruben Rustia as the ruthless outsider, the resulting instability requires an offbeat justification—one that Coching provides, with de Leon ensuring that it smacks the viewer as effectively as it would have on the printed page.

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Sanda Wong

Additional Language: Chinese
Year of Release: 1955 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon
Screenwriter: Teodorico C. Santos
Producers: Manuel Vistan Jr. Production & Chapman Productions

Cast: Jose Padilla Jr., Lilia Dizon, Danilo Montes, Lola Young, Gil de Leon, Ligaya Lopez

Lau Chien’s marriage to Lan Ying is stopped when bandits Sanda Wong and Yuen Fei try to steal from Chien’s vast inheritance. Shady garrison captain Koh Loo traps the two robbers to get the wealth for himself but Chien unexpectedly intervenes. Wong and Chien become unlikely allies but their bond is tested throughout Chien’s quest to be reunited with Lan Ying and reclaim his wealth.

Gerardo de Leon had already tackled the theme of an armed outsider reforming corruption in “straight” society in Sawa sa Lumang Simboryo (Snake in the Old Belfry, 1952); although weighed down by a surfeit of pulpy elements, the latter film resonated with the Philippines’s anti-US resistance movements, when the foreign occupants slandered our freedom fighters by calling them bandits—exactly the type of characters depicted in the film. In transposing the setting to an indeterminate “ancient China,” and introducing a male-bonding strategy that would intensify the conflicts in several of his forthcoming major films, de Leon managed to devise complex character interactions that could serve as the narrative counterpart of his diagonal deep-focus compositions. Moreover, he elevated his level of accomplishment to stake a claim on a type of Asian film that would proliferate later, where a lone hero sets himself or occasionally herself against a backward social order, exposing its barbarism in the process: Easterns, in effect, in contrast to Hollywood’s Westerns.

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Terror Is a Man

Alternate Titles: Creature from Blood Island; Blood Creature
Language: English
Year of Release: 1959 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon [as Gerry de Leon]
Screenwriter: Harry Paul Harber
(Unofficially adapted from H.G. Wells’s 1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau)
Producer: Lynn-Romero Productions

Cast: Francis Lederer, Greta Thyssen, Richard Derr, Oscar Keesee, Lilia Duran, Peyton Keesee, Flory Carlos

When William gets shipwrecked on an island, he is taken in by Dr. Charles Girard. He also encounters the doctor’s disturbing experiment: a panther being turned into a human. William argues that the procedure is unethical although Dr. Girard believes otherwise. But when the creature manages to escape, the two men must find a way to stop the monster’s murderous rampage.

Because of its association with American B-film production, Terror Is a Man was largely overlooked in the home country. Nevertheless this reworking of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau performed profitably enough to initiate the Philippines’s strongest contribution to US pop culture, before Imelda Marcos came along and provided ready-made punchlines for comic and/or melodramatic material. The Blood-Island film cycle—named after Val Guest’s The Camp on Blood Island (1958), a fairly successful Malaya-set entry about a Japanese concentration camp, from horror specialists Hammer Films—in fact figured in film historian Robert Sklar’s genealogy of the Hollywood Vietnam-War movie genre. According to Sklar, prior to the US’s pullout during the fall of Saigon in 1975, Blood-Island movies were the only way that English-speaking white male characters could be shown confronting literally animal savagery in unidentifiable tropical settings. A later rendition, John Frankenheimer’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), headlining Marlon Brando, reveled in the material’s camp elements—the same singular skill that de Leon would successfully develop much later, notably in his vampire cult films Kulay Dugo ang Gabi (Blood Is the Color of Night, 1964) and Ibulong Mo sa Hangin (Whisper to the Wind, 1966), plus his controversial local horror entry Lilet (1971). Among straight-faced adaptations of the Wells novel, however, Terror Is a Man is the version to beat.

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The Moises Padilla Story

Year of Release: 1961 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon
Screenwriter: Cesar Amigo
Producer: MML Productions

Cast: Leopoldo Salcedo, Joseph Estrada, Lilia Dizon, Ben Perez, Oscar Roncal, Rosa Aguirre, Robert Arevalo, Joseph de Cordova, Alfonso Carvajal, Jose Garcia, Mila Montañez, Max Alvarado, Martin Marfil, Bruno Punzalan

Moises Padilla decides to run for town mayor after witnessing multiple counts of abuse done by the private army of Negros Occidental governor Rafael Lacson. Along the way, Moises gets his former war comrade, who is now the town’s police chief, as his bodyguard. But since Lacson controls the area’s military and police, he vows to ensure that Moises’s mayoral bid will not prosper.

By all credible accounts, Philippine cinema’s gravest single loss is that of its best directorial stylist’s allegedly best film, Ang Daigdig ng mga Api (The World of the Oppressed, 1965). An estimate of just how appalling this calamity is can be inferred from the still-existing, fairly competent propagandistic film-biography Iginuhit ng Tadhana (Determined by Destiny): The Ferdinand Marcos Story, directed by Mar S. Torres, Jose de Villa, and Conrado Conde, which Gerardo de Leon’s entry was meant to counter when they competed in the first Manila Film Festival: the de Leon film went on to deservingly sweep the industry awards, but it is the Marcos movie that remains available.[3] A more effective and poignant way would be to take a look at de Leon’s earlier exercise in political advocacy, The Moises Padilla Story, based on the brutal treatment of a reformist who supported then-Defense Secretary Ramon F. Magsaysay. The narrative creates a polarized situation and unfortunately typecasts as villains Max Alvarado, Martin Marfil, and Bruno Punzalan—three great character actors with East Asian features; it then overlays the plot with the conflictive relationship between the title character and his former World War II guerrilla buddy, depicted as a deeply moving bromantic tragedy by Leopoldo Salcedo and Joseph Estrada respectively. De Leon’s solutions to these dramaturgical limitations are mostly technical, but breathtakingly so; even in the surviving print’s disjointed condition—missing, in addition, some portions of a grisly, extensive, cenaculo-worthy torture scene—one could believe that anyone who watched it would have cast a vote for the Guy (Magsaysay’s nickname), had he still been alive, all over again.

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El Filibusterismo

English Translation: The Anarchist
Additional Language: Spanish
Year of Release: 1962 / B&W
Director: Gerardo de Leon
Screenwriters: Adrian Cristobal, Jose Flores Sibal, Gerardo de Leon
(From the 1891 novel by José Rizal)
Producer: Arriva Productions

Cast: Pancho Magalona, Charito Solis, Teody Belarmino, Edita Vital, Ben Perez, Carlos Padilla Jr., Lourdes Medel, Robert Arevalo, Oscar Keesee, Ramon d’Salva, Joseph de Cordova

After touring the world, Crisostomo Ibarra returns to the Philippines as the mysterious jeweler Simoun. Wanting to spark a revolution to overthrow the Spanish colonial government, he allies with Basilio—the only one who knows Simoun’s true identity. After their initial attempt fails, their new plan will ultimately determine their fates.

Several possible reasons can be propounded as to why José Rizal’s much-acclaimed first novel, Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not), did not translate onscreen as well as his second one, or even compared with the former’s Sisa subplot, which had been adapted by Gerardo de Leon in 1951. In one of his later books, The Age of Globalization (2013, formerly titled Under Three Flags), the late Benedict Anderson argued that, among the late 19th-century’s several radical options, anarchism was the movement that eventually appealed to Rizal’s particular quest for identity and justice. Hence, although El Filibusterismo utilized a linear narrative, in contrast with the Noli’s use of multiple plot strands, it also had a more focused, nearly dogmatic ideological position. Any reader expecting a repeat of Noli’s grand humanist closure, its anti-colonial thrust blunted by its author’s still-reformist impulses, would therefore be understandably frustrated. Crisostomo Ibarra’s transmutation into Simoun in the Fili also heralded a darker, borderline-nihilist resolve in Rizal’s new realization: that only the full-scale purgation of the Philippine colonial system could lead to a brighter future for the country. De Leon’s ominous lighting and unsettling compositions, as executed by the great black-and-white cinematographic master Mike Accion, unexpectedly served the material better than anyone could hope for. If for nothing else, El Filibusterismo stands as proof that de Leon’s skills extended beyond technical expertise to include adept recognition and handling of politically complex material.

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Women in Cages

Alternate Title: Bamboo Doll House
Initial Title: Playpen
Language: English
Year of Release: 1971
Director: Gerardo de Leon [as Gerry de Leon]
Screenwriters: James H. Watkins & David Osterhout
Producers: New World Pictures & Balatbat Productions

Cast: Judith Brown, Roberta Collins, Jennifer Gan, Pam Grier, Bernard Bonnin, Charlie Davao, Johnny Long, Holly Anders, Dwight Howard, Roberta Swift, Paul Sawyer, Jeffrey Taylor, Marissa Delgado, Paquito Diaz, Sofia Moran, Carpi Asturias, Ruben Rustia

Thinking that her double-dealing boyfriend will eventually save her, a woman nicknamed Jeff agrees to be sentenced for drug-dealing at the aptly named Carcel del Infierno. There she meets level-headed Sandy, heroin addict Stokes (who secretly agrees to murder Jeff in exchange for drugs), and Theresa, a native woman who’s the girlfriend of Alabama, the sadistic warden. The women come to realize that with all their differences, their only hope for escape is in agreeing to help one another.

The women-in-prison genre (more accurately a hybrid subgenre of several film types including action, melodrama, and soft-core pornography) has been around from nearly the beginning of narrative film history, or ever since producers realized that they could reap profits from catering to the male gaze. Even Gerry de Leon’s contribution, Women in Cages (hereafter WiC), was preceded by a few months by Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House, which shared the same producer and several actors. The Philippines-set confections are remembered for Pam Grier’s breakout performances, to be cemented the year after WiC with Eddie Romero’s proto-blaxploitation entry Black Mama, White Mama. Grier’s participation alone makes WiC worth the attention, despite—or even because of—several eyebrow-raising elements attendant to her prison-warden character: as if swapping the male-gender casting wasn’t unusual enough, she was also a politically aware sadist who picked out the women she fancied for her sexual amusement. In addition to her name, her sarcastic question to the prisoners brought to work at a sugar plantation clues us into her function: “Don’t it make you pine for those cane fields in the South?” Her comeuppance in the hands of the maniacal posse she designated to hunt down escapees may be seen as a form of ironic justice, but then it arrives after a series of severe and sometimes mortal punishments that she inflicts on her unruly charges. Small wonder that Grier fan Quentin Tarantino described the film as “just harsh, harsh, harsh” while making sure to reference WiC in several of his own exploitation projects and providing Grier with her best role ever, in Jackie Brown (1997). More than Terror Is a Man (1959), WiC proves that de Leon at his peak was capable of drawing in insights and significations from a wide range of film genres and historical traumas, while centering one of the most beautiful foreign actors to ever grace an anonymous Pinas locale.

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Notes

[1] Another Noli Me Tángere (1930), by the legendary Jose Nepomuceno, garnered even more acclaim than any subsequent version, declared by some commentators as the best Filipino movie ever made up to that point. Like another more recent all-time best, Gerardo de Leon’s Ang Daigdig ng mga Api (The World of the Oppressed, 1965), it has been lost to posterity. Other local films through the years took the cue from de Leon’s Sisa by also featuring characters from Rizal’s fiction—e.g., Jun Aristorenas’s (as Junar) Elias, Basilio at Sisa (Elias, Basilio and Sisa, 1972). The last major adaptation of the Noli was the 1992 TV series produced by the Cultural Center of the Philippines and directed by de Leon’s confrere, Eddie Romero. In 1999, Mario O’Hara directed and wrote his own Sisa, where the title character interacted with the real-life Rizal.

[2] A nitrate-stock print of Dyesebel and its sequel, Anak ni Dyesebel (Child of Dyesebel, 1964), also directed by Gerardo de Leon, are the earliest Filipino films I remember watching, in a second-run provincial theater. Understandably my memory of either is patchy, with certain scenes of one film being confused with the other. Fortunately, I was able to figure out some details from conversations with the late GDL enthusiast Vic Delotavo, most memorably the line of dialogue where Dyesebel’s rival asks the male lead, “What does she have that I don’t have?”; my recollection of male mer-transformation, which incited what psychoanalysts might describe as a mild form of castration anxiety, is possibly in the sequel’s narrative. According to archivist-critic Jojo Devera, the existing videocopy available in the Philippines was struck from a film print in Thailand, which replaced the original soundtrack with a Thai-dubbed version and separated the film sound in audiotape format; unfortunately Teddy Co, the tape’s custodian, died before he could secure resources to facilitate the sound transfer. Monchito Nocon, member and board trustee of the Society of Film Archivists of the Philippines, directed my attention to Dyesebel Film Soundtrack Digitization and Restoration, a private Facebook group, that posted a copy of the much-contested tape. Pending further developments (which could take years to realize), the existing Dyesebel video may be regarded for now as essentially a silent film, the only such title in this entire canon listing—which is also mainly why this canon entry’s storyline is exhaustive.

[3] Another Ferdinand Marcos Sr. film-bio, Eddie Garcia’s Pinagbuklod ng Langit (Joined Together by Heaven, a.k.a. Heaven’s Fate, 1969), was produced for the dictator-to-be’s successful re-election campaign. A year later, a crony-owned company produced Jerry Hopper’s Maharlika (Royalty), a retelling of the Marcos-concocted myth about his World War II exploits as commander of the Maharlika unit. Possibly intended to justify his claim about having been the most decorated soldier in the Philippines, the movie also featured the story of Isabella, the American female soldier who fought alongside him and died in the effort, and with whom he fell in love. Dovie Beams, the American starlet who got the role, claimed that Marcos fell in love with her—in real life. The scandal acquired lurid and surreal dimensions when Beams called a press conference to claim that her life was being threatened by Imelda Marcos, and played apparently authentic and unexpurgated recordings of her intimate sessions with the President. For this reason, the movie’s local release was permanently postponed, although it was apparently screened in Guam and elsewhere; a year after the Marcos regime was ousted, however, Maharlika was finally shown in Manila.

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Dawn of Freedom

Alternate Titles: Liwayway ng Kalayaan; Fire on That Flag!; Ano hata o ute
Additional Language: Japanese
Year of Release: 1944 / B&W
Directors: Gerardo de Leon [as Associate Director] & Abe Yutaka
Screenwriters: Ryuichiro Yagi & Hideo Oguni
Producers: Eiga Heiku Sa, Toho Company, & X’Otic Films

Cast: Leopoldo Salcedo, Fernando Poe, Angel Esmeralda, Norma Blancaflor, Rosa Aguirre, Shigenobu Kawazu, Ichirô Tsukida, Denjirô Ôkochi, Fred Montilla, Carmen Rosales

During World War II, Filipino soldiers Captain Reyes, Captain Gomez, and Lieutenant Garcia leave their families in Manila to join the fight against invading Japanese forces in Bataan. Once there, they discover that Filipino troops are abused by their American counterparts. Gomez wanders into the Japanese camp and discovers a different reality, while Reyes and Garcia are betrayed by their American allies.

This singular epic, produced by the official film agency of the Japanese during World War II,[1] provided themes that other Filipino filmmakers would only be able to take up years later, after the emergence of anti-imperialist nationalism in the late 1960s initiated questions about the country’s one-sided preference for US domination. Seen today, the images of (homoerotic) fellow-Asian camaraderie set against unmitigated American duplicity are capable of delivering a primeval jolt. It is a wonderment drawn from the parallel-universe speculation of how things might have turned out if the West—as fantasized, understandably, in Dawn of Freedom—had lost the war, and probably not as badly as our worst fears might have convinced our forefathers then. After the defeat of the Japanese, Gerardo de Leon avoided the wrath of the returning US colonizers because certain members of his production team testified that he had assisted their guerrilla activities. Since then, he understandably avoided any overt suggestion of the pan-Asian ideal tackled in this film: his immediate postwar output was either silent on the question of the Philippines’s Asian identity or, as in the unnecessarily extended World War II prologue in 48 Oras (48 Hours, 1950), insistently and apologetically opposed to any such possibility. Dawn of Freedom’s propagandistic function, including footage of the Japanese’s victorious battles in the Philippines, may have required false depictions of the realities of the Imperial Army’s atrocities as well as of the local resistance to the occupation, but then any number of action quickies produced after the war were similarly guilty of plugging into the reverse bias of being pro-US, and therefore anti-fellow-Asian. Reduced to the question of which type of propaganda film has a more constructive message, Dawn of Freedom deserves to be high, if not on top, of the list, its cinematic integrity serving as icing on the cake.

Note

[1] The goal of imperial Japan was to promote a “Greater East Asian Cinema” as an essential component of its “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” (Janine Hanse, “The New Earth: A German-Japanese Misalliance in Film,” in In Praise of Film Studies: Essays in Honor of Makino Mamoru, ed. Aaron Gerow and Abé Mark Nornes, Kinema Club, 2001, pp. 184–97). For a sample of (necessarily pro-American) anti-Japanese propaganda, the well-known Atrocities of the Orient (also known as Outrages of the Orient or Beast of the East, directed by Carlos Vander Tolosa with new footage provided by William H. Jansen, 1948) may be sourced at YouTube.

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