∞ "Tortilla Flat"

350 Words filed by Frank @ 00:29 | 13-May-09 in Cinema |

A very strange movie. As Robert Osborne and Chon Noriega pointed out when introducing the film on TCM tonight, “Tortilla Flat,” directed by Victor Fleming, features three main characters, all supposedly “paisanos“ of Mexican ancestry living sometime after World War I in the Monterey County area, and played by: Hedwig Kiesler (Hedy Lamarr), an Viennese Austrian actress; Jacob Garfinkle (John Garfield), a Jewish man from the Lower East Side of Manhattan; and Spencer Bonaventure Tracy, an Irish-Anglo from Milwaukee. The characters all speak in the careful, slow-witted, sing-songy cadence favored by filmmakers portraying Latinos at the time, and the result is even more embarrassing than the iconic “I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges” stereotypes in John Huston’s “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

The appeal of the John Steinbeck novel seems to be that it is some sort of reworking of Arthurian legend wrapped up in a tale about simpler times and hearts of gold, which is perhaps why the story appealed to my father, a transplant to California from Arizona (he was 14 when Tortilla Flat was published), who was much more sentimental than he ever let on. But to me, the tale comes across as a mess, and the movie itself is nearly incomprehensible, largely a struggle to fight through the horribly belabored fake Mexican accents, the murky cinematography, and the ludicrous bumblings of the bibulous (the sheen of sweat is always on their faces, as if to underline the fact that they’re basically never sober), avaricious, yet supposedly good-hearted/decent characters.

Interestingly, Steinbeck himself seems to have understood that he lost control of his material as soon as he had finished writing it. In 1937, he wrote a furious foreword to Tortilla Flat in which he excoriated those “literary slummers” who had taken his novel as an excuse to make trips to Monterey to tour and gawk at the blue-collar neighborhoods there. He wrote that he was “sorry” if he had done “harm” to the paisanos by unintentionally creating a spectacle out of them, and he vowed that he would never write about paisano life again. ★

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