living with death
by Douglas Messerli
Emilio Carballido and Roberto
Gavaldón (screenplay, based on a work by B. Traven, based, in turn, on a story
by the Grimm Brothers), Roberto Galvaldón Macario
/ 1960
Only a couple of weeks before the
2013 Dio de las muertas I saw Roberto
Gavaldón’s “Day of the Dead” fable, Macario,
as part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s series “The Golden Age of
Mexican Cinema,” focusing on the cinematographer for the film, Gabriel
Figueroa.
Macario is a film woven
through with dire conditions and death. From its earliest frames we realize
that Macario’s family is near starvation. Working as a woodcutter, Macario
(Ignacio López Tarso) brings home heavy loads of wood that hardly afford his
family a full meal, and after witnessing a table of roast turkeys—none of them
for himself or his children—the father determines that he will go hungry until
he can eat a whole turkey for himself. Fearful for his survival, his wife (Pina
Pellicer) steals a turkey, stuffing it without his knowing into his satchel as
he heads off to work in the mountains.
Discovering the bird in his pack, he prepares to eat it, until suddenly
a man appears before him, the Devil, tempting the poor worker in order to get a
piece of its meat. Unlike Faust, Macario stands firm; he will eat the turkey by
himself. A second stranger, God, also passes by, in the guise of an elderly
man, similarly asking for a piece of the delicious looking turkey, but Macario
again refuses.
Because of easy engagement with the all-powerful figure, Death engages
in a perverse kind of friendship with the simple worker, presenting Macario a
container of water that, he insists, will work miracles, saving some of those
who about to die. The catch is, however, that Macario must look to the head and
feet any of those he might attempt to heal; if his “friend” appears at the head
of the victim, he is condemned to death, but if he appears at the feet of the
sick person, Marcario may cure her or him.
The potion is quickly put to the test when Macario returns home to
discover one of his sons has fallen into the well and is near death.
Fortuitously, Death appears at the boy’s feet, and Macario’s son is miraculously
cured. So begins, in this gossip-rich culture, Macario’s fame as a healer, as
time and again, he cures local victims near death. In this poor and deprived
culture it appears that nearly every family has someone dying, and Macario,
accordingly, becomes a kind of local hero—although understandably he is hated
by local physician, who has none of the simple man’s healing powers, along with
the undertaker! Together these men contact the authorities, who quickly bring
Macario’s actions to the attention of the church figures, who arrest Macario
for heresy. They determine he is either a charlatan or a witch, promising, if
he is the former, to cut out his tongue, or, if the latter, to burn him at the
stake.
Terrified by the prospect of his own demise,
our hero snatches up the icon, rushing off, with Death on the chase.
On the same day on which Macario’s wife has sent him off with a full
roast turkey, she is worried when he does not return home. She and her
neighbors discover him lying in the woods as if he had simply fallen asleep. He
is, of course, dead, his half of the turkey left untouched.
In this Mexican picture, it is not so much Death who controls the
characters’ fates, but the characters’ everyday association with and acceptance
of the dark forces of the world around them that predetermines their own
destinies. In the little village where Macario lives every day is “the Day of
the Dead.”
If this simple tale seems, at times, predictable in its moral
simplicity, the beautiful camerawork of its cinematographer, its assured
acting, and director Gavaldón’s skills at cinematic storytelling transform Traven’s
far clumsier and fatalistic tale into a gem of cinema history. The film was
nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film from the Academy Awards and shown
at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.
Los Angeles, October 12, 2013.
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2013).
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