One of the last and the best of those infamous Mexican nightclub melodramas (“Películas de Cabareteras”), it features a stunning noirish cinematography, over-the-top acting by half a dozen of wonderfully weird and wicked latina beauties such as Columba Dominguez and Kitty de Hoyos (looking like a drag queen performing Marilyn Monroe!) plus great -if low budget- musical show clips performed by the mesmerizing Esquivel, the “King of Zu-Zu-Zu”! Another masterpiece from the great (beer-drinking?) director Alfonso “Corona” Blake, who began as an assistant to Luis Bunuel and Emilio “Indio” Fernandez and gave the world some of the finest campy horror- and “Il Santo”-classics. Great fun to watch – if you ever get the chance to, for it’s not available on tape or DVD.
Late in the Rumbera cycle and from a pinnacle year for Mexican cinema (1957, imdb is wrong), this is almost nostalgic lament for a Mexico City perennial largely disappeared by right-wing morals campaigner Ernesto Uruchurtu (strictly speaking genrewise, this is an Exoticas, & Polynesian etc stylings figure among the RnB & jazz blues).
Top-billed Columba Dominguez sings a couple numbers; Kitty De Hoyos smokes up a storm & maintains her dignity while essaying a fine twist in a sequin bikini. Expressionist lensing from Rosalio Solano who shot El vampiro for Mendez that same year. At the helm, Alfonso Corona Blake, who made 3 top Mex-gothic horrors in the next decade (including arguably the best Santo film, Santo vs. las mujeres vampiro. & of course soundtrack duties are the province of Juan Garcia Esquivel, on the eve of his relocation northwards.
Cabaret trágico.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1h 38mn
Size: 1.37 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 704x476 ~> 704x528
Aspect ratio: 4:3
Frame rate: 23.976 fps
Bit rate: 1 800 Kbps
BPP: 0.224
Audio
#1: Spanish 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps
https://nitro.download/view/7A3913B31FCA60A/Cabaret_tragico.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/C91AA7B079FC0C8/Cabaret_trágico.eng_02.srt
Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English
The post Alfonso Corona Blake – Cabaret trágico (1958) first appeared on Cinema of the World.