EMILIO FERNANDEZ—Ten of a Kind
By Maggie Van Ostrand
May 2007 Guadalajara-Lakeside Volume 23, Number 9

     Just when you think you know everything about the golden age of movies, along comes still more information to snap you back to reality. You may not have heard of him either, but one of the most famous people in the history of Mexican cinema was Emilio Fernández Romo. In addition to Fernández’s fame in the movie industry (more about that later), his entire life was so fascinating that you’d want to invite him to dine, just to hear his stories spun.
     Fernández, born in 1904 in Coahuila, Mexico, grew up to be a strong supporter of Mexican cultural nationalism. He also grew to be quite tall at nearly six feet. He was alleged to have had “violent machismo,” rooted in the Revolution of 1910-17. This violent streak would surface many years later.
     Born of a Spanish father and an Indian mother, the boy was a mestizo (mestizaje). As a teenager, Fernández quit school to serve as an officer in the Huertista rebellion, which broke out December 4, 1923. Pancho Villa had been ambushed and killed the previous July, and it was theorized that he was assassinated by agents of then Mexican President Alvaro Obregón Salido. Obregón had defeated Villa in four successive battles, collectively known as the Battle of Celaya, when he served as a general during the Revolution. This Battle remained the largest military confrontation in Latin American history, until the Falklands War in 1982.
     According to Fernández’ biographers, under the Constitution of 1917 that Obregón himself helped write, Mexican presidents could not succeed themselves. (Obregón would later have the constitution amended so he could serve a second, non-consecutive term; after winning the presidential election of 1928, he was assassinated before his inauguration.)
     Obregón won the presidency in 1920 after inciting a successful military revolt against President Venustiano Carranza, who had planned on naming Ignacio Bonillas as his successor, not Obregón. The revolt began when the governor of Sonora, General Adolfo de la Huerta, broke with President Carranza and declared the secession of Sonora. This signalled the beginning of a successful uprising against Carranza led by Obregón and supported by General Plutarco Elías Calles.
     After Carranza was killed in an ambush, General Huerta served as provisional president of Mexico, until elections could be held. When Obregón won the federal election, Huerta became Minister of Finance in the new government.
     General de la Huerta considered himself the natural successor to President Obregón, just as Obregón had considered himself Carranza’s natural successor. The murdered Villa was seen as an ally of de la Huerta, who had publicly announced his candidacy for the presidency. Obregón, however, planned to remain in power by handpicking his successor, a political tradition that lasted throughout the 20th century.
     When President Obregón named his anti-clerical Minister of the Interior Plutarco Elías Calles as his heir, General de la Huerta rose up in a rebellion that eventually affected half the Mexican army. A native like de la Huerta of Sonora and a general in the Mexican army, Calles had preceded him as governor and military ruler of Sonora in 1915-16.
     De la Huerta assumed his service and loyalty to Obregón would have brought him the presidency, but Mexican presidents, not allowed to succeed themselves and limited (mostly) to one term, tried to extend their power by naming political puppets as successors. (Calles would outdo Obregón by controlling the Mexican presidency outright or through puppets from 1924 to 1934.)
     President Obregón was able to quash the rebellion by using loyal army units, battalions of workers and farmers, and United States intervention. By the time the rebellion ended in March 1924, 54 generals and 7,000 soldiers had been terminated by death on the battlefield, execution, exile, or dismissal. Obregón exiled de la Huerta to the United States; he worked as a music teacher in Los Angeles.
     Such was the cauldron of violence and nationalism in which young Fernández came into manhood. He received a 20-year prison sentence for his participation in the rebellion.
Escaping prison by following de la Huerta into exile, Fernández learned the rudiments of filmmaking as a Hollywood extra. With the election of Lázaro Cárdenas as president in 1934, the Huertista rebels were granted amnesty. General de la Huerta was recalled from exile by Cárdenas.
     Fernández returned to Mexico and began working in movies as a screenwriter and actor. Due to his Indian features, he was called “El Indio” and cast as bandits, charros, and revolutionaries.
     The Cárdenas government of 1934 to 1940 established the framework in which the Mexican Golden Age of Cinema could be realized. Cárdenas oversaw the redistribution of millions of acres of land to peasants and the expansion of collective bargaining rights and wage increases to workers.
     More historical events leading up to Fernández’ coming importance to Mexico must be written here as the foundation in which he prospered and in which his creative juices began to flourish.
     Arguably, Cárdenas’ most notable achievement was the nationalization of Mexico’s oil industry. After unsuccessfully trying to negotiate better terms with Mexican Eagle, the holding company owned by Royal Dutch/Shell and Standard Oil of New Jersey, Cárdenas nationalized Mexico’s petroleum reserves and expropriated the equipment of the foreign oil companies in 1938. A spontaneous six-hour parade broke out in Mexico City to celebrate the event.
     Unlike Castro’s nationalization of foreign assets in Cuba, Shell and SONJ were compensated for their expropriated assets. Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) and the Mexican model became a beacon for other oil-producing nations seeking to gain control over their own energy resources from foreign companies.
     Lázaro Cárdenas was the only PRM/PRI president who did not make himself rich. After retiring as Minister of Defense in 1945, the post he took after relinquishing the presidency, he assumed a modest lifestyle. He spent the last years of his life supervising irrigation projects and promoting education and free medical care for the poor. This was the man who set the tone of the modern Mexico that arose from the Revolution and Civil Wars of the 1920s, who cleared the ground for the great economic boom of the 1940s in which the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema reached its zenith.
     When the Mexican cinema was noticed north of the border, the focus fell on the brilliant cinematography of Gabriel Figueroa, who shot films for John Ford and John Huston, and on former Hollywood star Dolores del Rio.
     A little-known incident in Fernández’s life was his platonic relationship with del Rio. Her husband, multi-Oscar-winning designer, Cedric Gibbons, had been assigned the task of designing a statuette to be awarded annually for excellence in film by by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences. Dolores del Rio suggested Fernández as a perfect model for the statuette.
     It was Emilio Fernández who posed nude for the Oscar. Two-time Oscar winner, Anthony Quinn, the first Mexican ever to win the Oscar, might have thought of this as he clutched his prize.
     Mexican movies seldom strayed into Yankee consciousness, except for a rare one like La Perla, based on a novella by John Steinbeck. The Pearl was directed by Emilio Fernandez, who had told Steinbeck the Mexican folk tale about a pearl, and suggested it as a book. Fernández worked with Steinbeck to turn the story into the final movie, starring Pedro Armendariz and Dolores Del Rio.
     The film won the Mexican Academy Award for Best Picture, Figueroa won the Golden Globe Award for best cinematography, and Fernández was nominated for a Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival. Two of Fernandez’s films won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and were nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
     Maria Candelaria won Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1946. The film stars Dolores del Rio as the daughter of a prostitute trying to survive just before the Revolution. Set in the floating gardens of Xochimilco in Mexico City, del Rio’s character is shunned by the indigenous locals. Her great desire is to marry her lover, played by Pedro Armendáriz, but their romance is star-crossed.
     Fernández’s direction was flawless, and Figueroa’s cinematography masterful. They created a world cinema classic film, and became known as “Epoca de Oro.” Muralist David Siqueiros called Figueroa’s cinematography “murals that travel.”
     In their 25 films together between 1942 and 1958, El Indio and Figueroa created the idea of “mexicanidad” cinema while elevating the mestizaje identity, as well as the status of the pre-Columbian culture. The epic visual style they developed was indebted to Eisenstein’s unfinished “Que viva Mexico.” Their style fetishized the Mexican landscape through beautiful, carefully composed, stationary long shots.
     For two decades, Mexican art cinema was identified with the films resulting from the Fernández-Figueroa collaboration. Their films not only affected Mexican audiences’ collective identity, but they affected how their audiences, both domestic and global, viewed Mexico and its history.
     By the end of the 1940s, Fernández was the most famous and prestigious director in all of Latin America. He would continue his reign as Mexico’s premier director into the mid-50s, when his powers began to decline and Spanish émigré Luis Buñuel took over the title.
     Fernandez continued directing films until 1979, and began acting more. Gradually, the notoriety of his life began overtaking his reputation as a filmmaker.
“El Indio” lived out the fantasy of perhaps every director when he shot a critic in the testicles because the critic had not liked one of his movies. He shot and killed a farm laborer, an act which he claimed was in self-defense. Convicted of manslaughter in 1976, he served six months of a four-and-a-half year sentence.
     By the 1960s, Fernandez’s off-screen reputation as a violent man had led to his typecasting as brutal villains in many Mexican and American films. He appeared in John Ford’s The Fugitive (1947), on which he also served as associate producer.
     Other American films in which he appeared were John Huston’s The Unforgiven (1960) (on which he also served as second unit director) and The Night of the Iguana (1964), in which he played the barkeep, the John Wayne pictures The War Wagon (1967) and Chisum (1970) (on which he also served as second unit director), Sidney J. Furie’s “The Appaloosa” in which he had a supporting role to star Marlon Brando, and Burt Kennedy’s Return of the Seven (1966).
     After playing Mexican General Mapache Juerta in director Sam Peckinpah’s classic The Wild Bunch (1969), Fernandez appeared in two other Peckinpah films: as “Paco” in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), and as El Jefe, who gives the order Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974). He was reunited with John Huston in Under the Volcano (1984) and appeared in Roman Polanski’s Pirates (1986).
     In all, Fernández directed 43 pictures from 1942 to 1979. He was the credited screenwriter on 40 pictures, starting with Cielito Lindo (1936). He also served as second unit director, both credited and uncredited, on such American pictures shot in Mexico as The Magnificent Seven (1960), in which he was attached to the American crew by the Mexican film industry to ensure that the depictions of Mexicans were not racist or demeaning.
     Fernández died in Mexico City on August 6, 1986.
     In 2002, La Perla was named to the National Film Preservation Board’s National Film Registry, U.S. Library of Congress.
     Emilio Fernández and Gabriel Figuerora were honored on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of “El Indio’s” birth at the inaugural Puerto Vallarta Film Festival of the Americas held in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico in November 2004.
     All in all, Emilio Fernández was a remarkable man, with a fascinating life.