I honestly can’t account for why I became a Latinophile.  It seems doubly strange to me to be one, given that THE ALAMO (1960) was such a seminal work for me as a kid.  I grew up with the legend of those “13 days of glory” and the soundtrack to the John Wayne film (I only saw the actual movie much later) with its stirring ballads and rousing charges and wished, at the age of 7 or 8, that I could go back in time with a machine gun to help Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie defeat “the Mexicans.”  I was staunchly anti-Santa Ana and all of his uniformed “rudos” as a pre-teen – I hated their striped pants and plumed hats – and yet obviously something was working deep within me, changing me.  Maybe it was my parents’ bossa nova records, maybe it was all those boil-a-bags of Spanish rice, maybe it was finding out that BATMAN‘s archvillain “The Joker” was played by a Cuban, Cesar Romero, the “Latin from Manhattan” … I really can’t tell you. But within a few short years of my battle cry being “Remember the Alamo,” I was pumping my fist in the air with a hearty “Viva Santo!”

Maybe it was the colors.  You can’t beat the Spanish for primary colors.  Of course, the Joker was purely a creation of Batman creator Bob Kane, Jerry Robinson and Bill Finger (who based the characterization on the look of Conrad Veidt in Paul Leni’s silent classic THE MAN WHO LAUGHS) yet in the DC Comics he was invariably drawn in cool colors – a purple coat, green hair.  When Romero took over the role for television, the character became a walking Pop Art installation in fireball red.  The character has since been played by Jack Nicholson (in Tim Burton’s BATMAN) and the late Heath Ledger (in Christopher Nolan’s THE DARK KNIGHT), who both struggled to pigpile bonus perversity onto the shoulders of his iconic character, but the role belongs to Romero.  There was nothing lovable about Nicholson or Ledger’s performances and it’s that weird fine line between amusingly daft and full-on disturbing that makes Romero’s Joker a keeper.  He seemed almost grandfatherly, almost approachable, until that mad laugh and elastic lunacy flattened you against the wall.  I feared him.  I loved him.  I couldn’t wait to see what he’d do next.  While I can’t say Romero’s portrayal of the Joker boasted any expressly Latin notes, I can’t help but feel there was an influence there, a flavoring, that when viewed in retrospect made the whole thing make sense.

At some point I have to thank the editor (Forrest J. Ackerman) and publisher (Jim Warren) of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine for all the attention they gave in their magazine to Mexican horror movies.  Titles such asTHE VAMPIRE’S COFFIN (1958), THE BLACK PIT OF DR. M (1959), CURSE OF THE DOLL PEOPLE (1961), THE BRAINIAC (1962), SAMSON VS. THE VAMPIRE WOMEN (1962) and WRESTLING WOMEN VS. THE AZTEC MUMMY (1964) fired my imagination – would I ever get to see any of these? – while the Mexican women starring in these films, as either damsels in distress or befanged harridans, stirred my loins.  (Mind you, at the age of 12, a gentle breeze would have done the job as readily.)  Although it would take me some years to actually see the movies from which these pictures were taken, they were already teaching me a lesson about the heady mix of history and mythology and the aesthetic value of unchecked exaggeration.

In college, while my friends became Francophiles and Anglophiles, sporting berets (okay, I wore one, too – but I was a Basque!) and spelling words with superfluous vowels, I was a card carrying Latinophile, digging Los Lobos, reading Borges, finding out about the masked luchadore El Santo and hitting all the Mexican restaurants that New Haven had to offer.  While Famous Monsters had long since fallen by the wayside as I entered my post-college years, the slack was picked up by Fangoria and fanzines and books like The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.  Copious reviews of Mexican and Spanish horror movies were to be found in Phil Hardy’s The Overlook Encyclopedia of Film: Horror (second edition 1992) and within the pages of Video Watchdog.  At conventions, I was able to find video tapes of those great Mexican horror movies and supportive literature to boot.  The 90s were very good for my Latinophilia, kicked off as they were by the release of PedroAlmodóvar’s TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN! (aka ¡ÁTAME!).

It’s not as if Almodóvar were the first filmmaker to use incendiary swatches of primary colors to mirror the moods of his dramatic personae but for some reason I found his palette to be especially evocative.  Maybe it was the way he depicted modern day, urban Spaniards, who could not – for all the signifiers and symbols of modernity – deny the tempest of age-old passions swirling within.

I wanted to live in that world, to know these people, to visit their homes, sit on their furniture (especially the chairs in TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN! which looked to be made out of cardboard), use their red telephones, eat their gazpacho, and get in trouble.

Most critics hardwire Almodóvar’s outre aesthetic to his homosexuality and yet this bog standard white heterosexual male found plenty to identify with in these films.  Like me, Almodóvar was a film fanatic but his cinephilia became more than a tick list of references and homages.  Movies bled through him, seeped from his pores, were carried on his breath – and there’s just something so absolute, so unfettered, so perfectly Latin about that passion.  Almodóvar’s eye for the absurd and the absurdly beautiful has served him well for over 30 years, from the scatalogical pleasures of PEPI, LUCI, BOM (1980) to the entirely more serious but equally gorgeous BAD EDUCATION (2004) and the underrated VOLVER (2006), the last of his films I’ve seen to date.  I also have to give Almodóvar credit for making me want to seek out other Spanish filmmakers over the years – Luis Bunuel, Carlos Saura, Victor Erice, Claudio Guerín and Juan Antonio Bardem (father of Javier), to name but a few – and this doesn’t even take into account the Spanish horror film directors Enrique López Eguiluz, Carlos Aured,  Javier Aguirre, José Luis Merino, Eloy de la Iglessia and Amando de Ossorio, most of whom worked with Spanish “monster man” Paul Naschy (nom de lune of Jacinto Molina) over the years.  What’s always great is when the same actors appear in both high art and low art.  I knew I was a true Latinophile when I could point to the randy drycleaner of Almodóvar’s LABYRINTH OF PASSION (1982) and say “Hey, that’s Luis Ciges from THE VAMPIRES’ NIGHT ORGY (1973)!”

I live in Los Angeles now, which is a great place to live if you like Latin movies.  The old Tower Records on Sunset had a Latin film section but even today Mexican grocery stores like Vallarta stock $5 DVDs of classic (and not so classic) Mexican movies that even GreenCine and Netflix don’t carry while Olvera Street offers a fun, if touristy, beginner’s course in Latin culture.  And there’s always something cooking over at Univision, often an old Santo movie or something with Pedro Armendáriz, the great Mexican actor who floated between Hollywood and Mexico City between the 1940s and his death in 1963 – you may remember him as “Pete,” John Wayne’s partner in crime in John Ford’s 3 GODFATHERS (1948), or as the wily Turk Kerim Bey in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963).  And sometimes I leave on the cartoon MUCHA LUCHA for my children.  Inspired by El Santo and all those great Mexican masked wrestlers, the show is as noisy and abrasive as most kid shows these days but I like its heart and the colors are suitably vivid.  It’s not quite as good as the old EL HOMBRE cartoons that used to run on PEEWEE’S PLAYHOUSE but I guess it’ll do for now to give my ninos a taste of the Latin flavor that made their father a man.

This post was written for TCM’s “Latino Images in Film” series, running all this month.  Watch aPedro Armendáriz or Pedro Almodóvar movie today!