Indemnity, it hovers about the edges of the narrative like the perfume that Phyllis Dietrichson tells Walter Neff she bought in Ensenada, where people drink 'pink wine' instead of bourbon. No matter how the Latin world is represented, however, it is nearly always associated with a frustrated desire for romance and freedom; again and again, it holds out the elusive, ironic promise of a warmth and color that will countervail the dark mise- en-scene and the taut, restricted coolness of the average noir protagonist. In Double Indemnity, Fred Mac-Murray almost escapes to Mexico; in Raw Deal, Dennis O'Keefe tries unsuccessfully to escape to Panama; in In a Lonely Place, some of Humphrey Bogart's most disturbing scenes with Gloria Grahame are set off against a framed reproduction of a Diego Rivera painting; and in Ride the Pink Horse, the embittered war veteran played by Robert Montgomery finds brief refuge by hiding in the tiovivo carousel.
Interestingly, many of the classic films noirs were made during a time of increased racial tensions in the Latin communities of Los Angeles. The Sleepy Lagoon case of 1943, in which a group of Chicanos were framed for the 'Lover's Lane' murder of a white couple, may have been an indirect influence on Joseph Losey's postwar, social- realist thriller, The Lawless, and later on Welles's Touch of Evil. For most filmmakers, however, the Latin world was imagined as a place located on the other side of the country's borders. Notice also that when classic Hollywood's noir characters traveled to Latin America, they took all their neuroses with them, and in a sense they never really left home. (This effect was heightened by the fact that Hollywood movies tended to use foreign settings merely as decor, staging most of the action on studio sets.) In Notorious, the Rio enclave of Nazis and U.S. spies is situated apart from the city, which is glimpsed in a few postcard views and functions as a sensual backdrop for a network of jealous obsessions among foreigners. In Gilda, the Buenos Aires casino is owned by a Nazi, and it bears a strong resemblance to the European-U.S. nightclub in Casablanca. In His Kind of Woman, Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell find themselves in a Baja California resort that looks as if it had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; the resort functions as a playground for rich Yankees, and the Mexicans themselves are in evidence only as strolling musicians or bumbling cops. And in Out of the Past, there is a moment when a corner of Mexico suddenly becomes New York: 'There's a little cantina down the street called Pablo's,' Jane Greer says. 'It's nice and quiet. A man there plays American music for a dollar. You can shut your eyes, sip bourbon, and imagine you're on 59th Street. '
These half-seen, barely experienced Latin locales give a picturesque quality to the films and perpetuate stereotypical images of passionate lovers and quaint peasants. In at least two cases, the Latin background heightens the sexy aura of Rita Hayworth, whose real name was Margarita Carmen Cansino. It also enhances the feeling of sophistication in films that are already imbued with an urban sensibility; the 1940s were, after all, a period when Latin and Afro-Caribbean motifs were all the rage in cafe-society nightspots like the Mocambo and the Trocadero, and when dances like the samba and the rumba were popular among the upper classes. Hollywood's vision of Latin America was therefore largely confined to a melange of sentimental pastoralism and chic primitivism. Even so, the movies were careful not to associate the ownership of casinos and nightclubs with Latin Americans (usually the owner is a fascist emigre or a deported gangster), and they occasionally hinted at Yankee imperialism. Welles's Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil are especially notable for the way they show rich northerners using the Latin world as a kind of brothel and for their brief glimpses of poverty on the Mexican streetsa theme that was much more evident before Columbia reedited the first picture.
In the 1960s and 1970s, when Latin America became a battleground between socialist revolutionaries and the CIA, some of the more romantic imagery of Latin countries began to temporarily disappear from U.S. screens. At the same time, urban life in the United States was being increasingly Latinized. Los Angeles in the years between 1920 and 1960 had the highest proportion of native-born white Protestants of any major city in the country; but after 1960, there was a great influx of Latino and Chicano Catholics. This phenomenon was repeated in other metropolitan centers of the Southwest and Florida, to the point where certain politicians demanded that a wall be built around the southern U.S. border and that English be established as the official U.S. language. Perhaps Hollywood was equally nervous about the population change. The new demographics are barely noticeable in the original release print of the futuristic Blade Runner (1982), which is set mostly in L.A.'s Chinatown and expresses a deep ambivalence about aliens or hybrids. (As Rolando J. Romero points out, the prerelease version featured a character played by Edward James Olmos, who provided a kind of synecdoche for the Chicano population.)
The population growth in certain cities of North America eventually led to new kinds of noir settings. One of the most significant developments was the emergence of 'Miami noir,' a term that applies equally well to Body Heat, the Miami Vice TV show, and Blood and Wine (1997). Unfortunately, few pictures in this vein have made significant use of Latin characters. Almost the same thing might be said of the Miami-based, hard-boiled fiction of Charles Willeford and Elmore Leonard, who have not been adapted as often as one might expect. During the 1980s, Jonathan Demme and Fred Ward produced an intelligent film version of Willeford's Miami Blues, and Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino's adaptation of Leonard's Rum Punch, was released as this book went to press. So far, the best movie derived from Leonard's Florida novels is the lightly comic and not terribly noirlike Get Shorty (1996). (The protagonist of this last film is a Miami gangster named 'Chili' Palmer, but he is played by John Travolta. Other important details are treated in similarly cavalier fashion; when Palmer makes a charming and admiring speech about Touch of Evil, he gets most of the facts wrong.)
The situation today is all the more ironic because, as I note in chapter 1, Latin America has a strong tradition of film noir: consider, as only two examples of many that could be listed, Julio Bracho's Distinto amanecer (Mexico, 1943) and Jorge Ileli's Mulheres e Milhdes (Brazil, 1961), the last of which has many things in common with The Asphalt Jungle and Rififi. Such pictures usually represent the Latin world as a dark metropolis rather than as a baroque, vaguely pastoral refuge from modernity, and as a result, they indirectly reveal a mythology at work in Hollywood. Two of the more effective recent examples include Foreign Land (1995), a Brazilian-Portuguese coproduction directed by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, and Deep Crimson (1997), a Mexican remake of The Honeymoon Killers (1970), directed by Arturo Ripstein. Both of these films are sharply attuned to the noirlike themes of moral culpability and doomed love, and have more poetic resonance than most of the neo-noir features from Hollywood. Unfortunately, we have no Latino versions of such North American 'border' films noirs as Border Incident, Touch of Evil, The Border (1982), and Lone Star (1996), all of which center on racism and economic exploitation in the Southwest. The closest approximation is Robert Rodriguez's ElMariachi (1992), a comic, 'wrong-man' thriller, in which everyone except the Anglo villain speaks Spanish.
Meanwhile, the classic implications of the Latin world have tended to reappear with little modification in Hollywood neo-noir. In Body Heat, the sultry femme fatale is last seen on a beach in Rio, reclining next to her Latin lover. In The Wrong Man (1994), repressed sexual tensions break out among a group of North Americans traveling in Mexico. In The Juror (1996), a chase begins in New York and ends in a remote Guatemalan village during a carnival; the concluding scene shows the heroine (a single mom who designs postmodern art) gunning down the psychotic bad guy (a Mafia hit man with sophisticated artistic taste) inside an ancient Mayan temple, assisted by villagers wearing carnival masks. Elsewhere, especially in gangster movies, the South American drug lord now rivals the Italian mobster as a favorite villaina trend established by the remake of Scarface (1983), which smoothes the transition from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean by casting Al Pacino in the role of a Cuban. In such pictures, Latin America continues to be represented in the form of a garish nightclub. The only difference is that the place is filled with colored light and is supposed to be owned by the Latins themselves.
