Review: Roberto Gavaldón’s Western Melodrama ‘Soledad’s Shawl’ on VCI Entertainment Blu-ray

Known primarily as a chronicler of urban crime and corruption with noirs like In the Palm of Your Hand, The Other One, and Night Falls, Mexican director Roberto Gavaldón proved himself equally adept at tackling another popular national genre of the era, the rural melodrama, with 1952’s Soledad’s Shawl. Following a skilled doctor, Alberto Robles (Arturo de Córdova), who yearns to leave the small, remote town he works in and return to Mexico City for an important research job, Gavaldón’s film is a superb exploration of the dichotomies between urban and rural, science and superstition, and body and soul.

While the presence of Catholic morality is pervasive throughout, the film resists such trite tropes like the sinful city man learning the values of religion or coming to love the simple charms and beauty of the countryside. This rural region is seen instead as a place of grinding poverty, enduring superstitions, and unbridled machismo—where the ways of the old world continue to live on.

Indeed, it’s the harmful work of a witch doctor (Guillermo Calles) that brings Alberto into the orbit of Soledad (Estela Inda), an angelic peasant who comes to work as his housekeeper as payment for him saving her brother’s arm from potential amputation. And through Soledad, Arturo is forced to contend with a pair of dueling landowners: David Acosta (Carlos López Moctezuma), who tyrannically lords over the villagers, and Roque Suazo (Pedro Armendáriz), who, despite his more refined demeanor, is every bit as misogynistic and arrogant as his foe.

Where Soledad is too bluntly symbolic of a suffering Madonna figure to transcend her status as a classic trope of Mexican cinema, especially once her purity is inevitably tainted by one of the film’s cruel and powerful men, Alberto’s various crises help ground Soledad’s Shawl in its modern setting. Serving as a middle ground between the noble, impoverished townsfolk and maniacally evil landowners, Alberto embodies the eternal struggle between the two, perpetually at war with his own desires and struggling to determine what he actually wants out of life.

In its own way, Soledad’s Shawl seeks to portray the depths of poverty in rural Mexico and the reasons for its perpetuation, just as Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados did for its urban counterparts. But Gavaldón’s film is at its best not when engaging in melodramatic social commentary, but when it focuses on Alberto’s existential plight, detailing his alienation in this backwards little town as well as the unsuspecting inspiration he eventually draws from it.

Image/Sound

VCI’s transfer from the 35mm acetate copy of the Cineteca Nacional’s collection is plenty sharp but is slightly lacking in detail in wide shots, while the contrast isn’t consistently strong in various nighttime scenes. The grain distribution, though, is tight and even, and there are no signs of scratching, flickering, or debris. On the audio front, the dialogue is clean, though the music, particularly the few instances of a children’s choir singing, sounds a tad blown out.

Extras

Aside from a handful of trailers, the lone extra is a 25-minute interview with film historian David Wilt. He spends a bit too much time on the many awards the film won in its heyday, but otherwise, he provides a well-researched overview of the golden age of Mexican cinema, covering all the major actors, directors, and genres that were popular at the time. Fittingly, he also spends a good deal of time detailing the careers of Roberto Gavaldón, cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, and stars Arturo de Córdova and Pedro Armendáriz.

Overall

VCI’s new Blu-ray of Roberto Gavaldón’s rural melodrama is another step toward correcting the appalling dearth of physical releases of films from the golden age of Mexican cinema.