António Lopes Ribeiro and Max Nosseck | Gado Bravo (Wild Cattle) / 1934 [in Portuguese only]

the state of male behavior

by Douglas Messerli

 

Erich Philippi (screenplay), António Lopes Ribeiro and Max Nosseck (directors) Gado Bravo (Wild Cattle) / 1934 [in Portuguese only]

 

The other evening, I watched Wild Cattle, a film in which many of the crew and cast were Austrians and Germans who had recently escaped the Nazi’s by moving to Portugal. Portugal itself, now under the dictatorship of conservative and autocratic ideologies created by António de Oliveira Salazar, President of the Council of Ministers from 1932 until 1968, was undergoing radical national agricultural reform under the Estado Novo (the “New State”), and this film makes some mild bows to the countryside agricultural workers.

     But the film is primarily set in Lisbon and when it moves to the countryside it is to the cattle country of the Ribatcio province, with its own romantic history of caballeros, the Portuguese version of cowboys and bullfighters, a world brilliantly recreated in this film by the director of photography, Heinrich Gärtner and by the set designer, Herbert Lippschitz.

     Before I begin to describe the heart of this film, I must mention that what little Portuguese I know was picked up on my couple of visits to Brazil in the early years of the millennium, and I cannot claim any linguistic fluency. Yet it doesn’t take a deep understanding of the language to follow the story of the famed landowner and bullfighter Manuel Garrido (Raul de Carvalho), who after winning a major bullfight attends the nightclub where Nina (Olly Gebauer) is performing.

     As she begins her song, Garrido enters, the entire audience suddenly turning to toast him and sing an alternate song to him in celebration. Furious with the lack of attention, she stomps offstage, much to the consternation of her companion “impresario,” Jackson (Sig Arno). He attempts, without much success, to lure her back on stage, realizing that if she refuses to perform they will again lose their jobs. Failing, he begins packing all her dresses into their luggage trunk, at one point even joining them.

     But at the last moment, she decides to return to stage, this time carrying an armful of long-stemmed roses which she tosses out to the desirous men, managing to make a small cut on Garrido’s face with a thorn in punishment for his upstaging of her act.

      So begins a comic romance in which Garrido becomes enchanted with Nina even while he is locally committed to the love of Branca (Nita Brandao).

      Set against this romantic story is Arno’s character of Jackson who is represented in this work as everything Garrido and his kind are not—a feminized, impotent, and quite apparently gay figure who throughout jumps, leaps, and is propelled through the air as if he were a jack-in-the-box, who dances in a mix of Groucho Marx and a hoochie coochie performer, and ends up continually doing women’s work, eventually winding up in drag to escape a man who mistakenly believes he is attempting to seduce his wife.

 

    Jackson, strangely enough, is at the center of this otherwise quite macho tale, if for no other reason than Arno is such a brilliant comedian. Indeed when he is not onstage, driving wildly through a cattle ranch that doesn’t even permit autos or drinking himself into a stupor, the film drags. After all, Nina, as we soon discover, is a true bitch, a would-be seductress of our macho patron, and ends up murdered by another lover in the movie’s last moments. Strangely, even Nina seems to be unable to put Jackson out of her mind. After arriving at Garrido’s estate, even though by this time romantically attracted to the bullfighter, she dreams of Jackson’s hilariously daring deeds which brought her to Garrido’s mansion.

     And although our dashing bullfighting hero is torn between the love of two women, he is still also controlled by his clearly loving male friend, who at several points in the film steers him away from a female romantic involvement. Moreover, Garrido is himself quite attracted to the rough-hewn local singer who performs local songs for him, Nina, and Jackson when they first arrive.

     Throughout the film, except for a couple of deep clinches with Nina, Garrido seems much more comfortable with his hands on his male compatriots and obviously feels more comfortable around his own cowboys and the other bullfighters in the ring who challenge the bulls with cape and sword as he rides around on a horse as a rejoneo, tossing his rejones de castigo and banderillas into the animal’s neck and shoulders. And it is his close friend who quite literally grabs, hugs, pulls, and redresses his now drunken friend in order to bring him into the ring.

      By the end of the film, as Nina is murdered and Jackson slips out of the picture, the focus shifts, in fact, to a marvelous bullfighting sequence as the police stand by, waiting to arrest Garrido for his possible murder of the woman. He’s not guilty and can now return to his country estate to marry the local girl while daily hanging out with his male companions.

       Although made mostly by men and women “in transit,” so to speak, this film, as Portuguese critic Paulo Cunha observes, was one of early full realizations of Portuguese culture: “Despite the significant presence of foreigners and the clear attempt to internationalize this project, producer Hamilcar da Costa clarified that this film was “resolutely and unmistakably” Portuguese, as it was “conceived by a Portuguese mentality, filmed in the same country, focusing on parts of our life, carried out exclusively in Portuguese locations, manages to have and give an indispensable unity to a spectator to recognize in it as a national work.”

 

Los Angeles, July 19, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).