Brute Launch from Nowhere

Ronald Brownstein's "Frownland" and the '50s Mexican melodrama "Aventurera" on DVD.

Another brute launch from nowhere, the infamous Mexican melodrama “Aventurera” (1950) is likely the wildest whore trauma-Carmen Miranda musical-romantic potboiler that Edgar G. Ulmer never made. My familiarity with postwar Mexican film is more or less dominated by Buñuel, wrestler adventures and cheap horror films beloved by Famous Monsters of Filmland (“The Brainac” lives!), and so I cannot say that the headlong excess of this torrential woman’s-film odyssey took my surprise, from its first primal-scene confrontation to its domino cascade of white slavery, betrayal, coincidence, showgirl noir-ness, heist crime and usury.

But there did not appear to be much of a censorship problem, resulting in a flood of venal suggestiveness that no child could misunderstand, and the comically cavernous mansion sets suggest a Mexican viewership that did not require much reality in their smokin’ cup of thrills-&-heartache. In the middle of all this strides the game, toothsome and none-too-subtle Ninón Sevilla, feeling every narrative tempest in her solar plexus and wearing outfits on stage that would’ve gotten her arrested in Santa Monica in the ‘50s.

“Frownland” (Factory 25) and “Aventurera” (Cinemateca/Facets) are now available on DVD.

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