Lupita Tovar: The Sweetheart of Mexico
Lupita Tovar had a short acting career during a long life, one that lasted 106 years. Passing away on the 12th of November 2016, Tovar was one of the surviving links to Old Hollywood. Between 1929 and 1952, she appeared in many supporting and bit parts. Yet Tovar was best known for her role in the Spanish-language version of Dracula (1931) and Santa (1932), one of the first talkies in the burgeoning Mexican cinema. At 5’1”, Tovar was short and sensual. Underneath pencil-thin eyebrows, her eyes were as dark as her wavy black hair, which flowed forth from her head in tight ringlets. In these two films she exudes a refined elegance and a confident sexuality, a shy naivety and a self-possessed worldliness.
Since its re-release in the 1990s, George Melford’s Dracula has grown in stature. It’s better than Tod Browning’s better-known version, although no one can rival Bela Lugosi, let alone Carlos Villarías, for iconography. Nevertheless, Melford’s film is less creaky, has more camera movement, and has the stench of eroticism missing from its English-language counterpart. As Eva Seward, Tovar is initially prim and proper. Hair bobbed, bedazzling with long, dangling earrings, and decked in white, we first see her in the box seats of a ritzy theatre, surrounded by her father, Dr. Seward (José Soriano Viosca), her friend, Lucía (Carmen Guerrero), and her boyfriend Juan Harker (Barry Norton). Fresh from Transylvania, Dracula greets them, mesmerizing Lucía and creeping out Eva. “I prefer someone a little more normal,” she says to Lucía, playfully chiding her fascination with the Count.
Once Dracula morphs into a bat, flies into her bedroom, bites her neck as he must do, Eva changes. There’s a flip in her personality, and it shows in Tovar’s performance. She’s stiff with civility. She possesses the learned behavior of high society. She looks and acts like the rich daughter of a doctor who owns an asylum. But once the Count’s blood flows through her, Eva becomes someone else. “You look like a different woman,” Harker says dumbfounded. Tovar’s movements are more “open.” Her hands make sweeping, arcing motions. She throws her head back with thrill and abandon. Being a vampire doesn’t seem so bad if you’re this animated.
Next year, and a handful of films later, Tovar would undergo not one, but several transformations in the commercially successful Santa. It’s a sordid and sentimental tale of naturalism in which Tovar plays the title role. She’s a poor country girl who becomes a victim of her environment and circumstances. Think of it as a third-rate Balzac narrative. As Santa, Tovar is a young innocent who falls in love with a shiftless soldier. She first sleeps with him in pastoral rapture, and then is abandoned by him. Thenceforth she seeks solace in a bordello where she befriends and is loved by the house of sins’ blind pianist. He’s the only man devoted to her through thick and thin times, emphasis on the thin.
Santa shows Tovar’s broad range. During the film, she is a girl with long pigtails, falling in love too easily; a coquettish prostitute in a tight dress; the doting girlfriend of a torero in elegant eveningwear; and the frail and pale of the destitute and dying.
Every man wants a piece of Santa, literally grabbing at a part of her body. When she first enters the bordello, an old stumblebum, a regular client, pulls her dress down and kisses her bare shoulder. Before facing the bulls for the first time, the torero gets dressed in his traje de luces with the help of his squire. Spinning, he wraps himself in his cummerbund, finishing by embracing Santa. The blind pianist asks his boy helper to describe the way she looks beginning with her hair. “Her hair is a color you must know – black! … She has such dark eyes that if you could see them…” he trails off. “I would go blind,” the pianist finishes. Santa is many things to many people, namely men.
After Santa, Tovar made a few more Spanish-language versions of Hollywood films. She rattled around in the Hollywood system, appearing in a Gene Autry oater (South of the Border) and a cheap Buster Keaton talkie (The Invader). The same year Santa was released she married the powerful Hollywood agent Paul Kohner, who arguably started the idea of releasing Spanish versions of Hollywood fare. By the 1950s, Tovar set aside her acting to raise her son, Pancho, and her daughter, Susan, who would go on to earn a nomination for her role in Imitation of Life (1959). She’s also the grandmother of the guys who gave you American Pie (1999). But forget her as the matriarch of a Hollywood family. Forget her astonishing longevity. She was known as “The Sweetheart of Mexico.” Tovar was there at the start of Mexico’s film industry, and that’s something.
by Tanner Tafelski