Mexico doesn’t really do superheroes, as we know them north of the border.  It’s not as if the country is averse to caped crusaders in form-fitting unitards… they just want to see them wrestle.  While the crime-smashing exploits of Batman and Superman captured the imaginations of us gringos, Mexican kids (and adults) thrilled ringside to the grappling of flamboyant luchadores, or professional wrestlers, whose true identities were concealed behind masks and such colorful aliases as Demonio Azul (“Blue Demon), Mil Máscaras (“1,000 Masks”) and the greatest luchadorof them all, El Santo (“The Saint”).

Born on this day in 1917, Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta moved with his family in the 1920s from provincial Hidalgo to bustling, overcrowded Mexico City, where he grew up playing American football and baseball and dabbled in wrestling.  Although he wrestled professionally beginning in the 1930s under a number of aliases, he chose El Santo as his professional name when he stepped into the Arena Mexico.  Santo enjoyed success as a traveling technico (a good guy wrestler who plays by the rules) but became an icon when Mexican artist and screenwriter Jose Guadalupe Cruz began to depict him as a comic book hero.  From here, it was just a short leap to movie appearances, beginning in a pair of Cuba-lensed productions — SANTO CONTRA CEREBRO DEL MAL (SANTO VS. THE BRAIN OF EVIL, 1961) and SANTO CONTRA HOMBRES INFERNALES  (SANTO VS. THE INFERNAL MEN, 1962) — in which he was really just a supporting character. 

In Mexico, Santo made 50 movies in which he encountered (either going it solo or in the company of a companero) all manner of foes, from Mafia gunsels to invaders from outer space and even such Gothic superstars as Dracula, The Wolfman and the Frankenstein Monster.  Pictures from these films reprinted within the pages of magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland and in such film books as Barrie Pattison’s The Seal of Dracula and David Pirie’s The Vampire Cinema  whetted American teen and pre-teen appetites for these films, in which buxom women often played pivotal roles (and nudity was rumored to occur).  Many of the more marketable Santo vehicles were imported to the United States and dubbed into English by K. Gordon Murray, who rechristened the character Samson.  I loved the idea of these movies when I was 12 and continue to love the reality of them at the ripe old age of 47.  The earlier, black-and-white movies with their bottomless Expressionist shadows have a smoky, chiraroscuro charm, like Rorschachs of childhood nightmares …

… while the later, full color films with their onslaught of garish, almost Day-Glo primaries feel like tense moments remembered from a particularly traumatic funhouse ride…

I have a small collection of Santo films on DVD and love to throw them on from time to time.  It’s like spending the afternoon with an old friend.  While movie heroes got more and more grandiose in the second half of the 20th Century and on into the New Millenium, Santo remained humble and useful, his home modest and sparely furnished with items and decorations he must have seen in Playboy.  Yes, he had a snappy sportster and enjoyed taking his lady to fine restaurants but there was otherwise something Zen and uncomplicated about Santo as compared to the grotesque uber-affluence of The Dark Knight, whose insistence on living alone in a huge mansion on acres and acres of private land feels a little gross and imperial.  

Santo made his last film appearance in LA FURIA DE LOS KARATECAS (FURY OF THE KARATE KILLERS), which he filmed in Florida in 1982, the year of his retirement from wrestling (at the age of 65!).  He stayed in the limelight to a degree by appearing in a Mexico City nightclub act (and starting up a second career as an escape artist).  After performing in two of three shows on the evening of February 4, 1984, Guzmán Huerta complained of pain in his left arm and was rushed to a local hospital, where he died of a heart attack that night.  Just a month earlier, he had voluntarily unmasked himself live on Mexican television, shocking a generation of lucha libre fans who had grown up on his accomplishments.  So strongly and widely identified with the image of El Santo was Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta that he was buried in his silver mask, his coffin bearing both is birth name and his world famous nom-de-lucha.  Through two marriages, he had fathered 11 children, among them Jorge Guzmán, who wrestles (and appears in films) under the name of El Hijo de Santo… the Son of Santo!

Feliz cumpleanos, El Santo, héroe de todos!

The online DVD rental outfits Netflix and GreenCine offer a couple of Santo movies and Netflix seems poised to add even more titles to its library.