Poster of the Week!

Poster of the week! Alas, a bit late on serving the feast this weekend, so a Poster of the Week would have to suffice.

Charles Chaplin called him the "funniest man in the world", and his stage name became a Spanish verb (cantinflear - an act of doubletalk; a torrent of verbiage for a prolonged amount of time that fails to make any sort of sense at all). Of course, we are referring to the great Mexican movie comedian Mario Moreno Reyes 'Cantinflas'.

U.S. film fans are probably more familiar with Cantinflas' turns in Hollywood pictures like Around the World in 80 Days and Pepe, both in which he co-starred with the biggest stars in Hollywood. Although he was quite a remarkable physical comedian, it was his verbal acuity, wordplay and twisting of logic and syntax that made him the biggest comedy star in Mexico and throughout Latin America. Translating Cantinflas' unique brand of verbal humor into American English was close to an impossible task ("like translating Groucho Marx into Chinese," someone put it), so instead the American producer-directors (Mike Todd and George Sidney, the men behind 80 days and Pepe, respectively) insisted on a broader physical sort of comedy. If it worked at all, it was because of Cantinflas' talents and comic instincts solely. Pepe is a plodding nag of a picture that was intended as a breakthrough star vehicle for Cantinflas, but was so dull and ponderous (almost 3 hours long!) that it can almost serve as a textbook example in how not to make a comic film. Some consider 80 Days to be the worst film ever to win a Best Picture Oscar. Well... maybe. At any rate, Cantinflas is the best thing in the movie, and the only reason that I find to stick with long drawn out mess whenever it shows up on TV (which used to be often, but not so much anymore, except maybe on TCM.

There's not much Cantinflas' Mexican work on DVD, although you can possibly find copies of his early films with gray market dealers (like this one from Argentina, which has some pretty cool screenshots and title cards). There's also very little about Cantinflas on the web. There's some information from Answers.com (by way of wikipedia), a page on Cantinflas cartoons that were very popular in the '60s, a NY Times article about a one man show entitled "¡Cantinflas!" (which looks very good, by the way), and a poem by Victor Hernandez Cruz.

Throwing my meager penny into the pot, I offer a Cantinflas paper doll cutout from a program for the 1944 film Gran Hotel, which I have available as both jpeg and pdf, so you can print it, cut it up, and dress Cantinflas up as a bellboy, waiter, vagabond, or debonair man about town. But wait! There's more! As a special extra bonus, I've also thrown in the original poster from Gran Hotel