Tonight Only: "Prisioneros De La Terra"
The restored 1939 Argentine classic screens online Monday night courtesy of Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation.
A quick heads up for paid subscribers: A restored print of the excellent Argentinian melodrama “Prisioneros De La Terra” (⭐⭐⭐⭐, 1939) was made available this past Saturday in a 72-hour online window courtesy of Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, which means you can watch it until midnight tonight (Monday 4/10). If you can clear your schedule, there’s a live online screening tonight with a chat component at 7:00 p.m. EDT. Either way, director Mario Soffici’s epic of colonialism, exploitation, and star-crossed romance is well worth seeing — based on four stories by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga and gorgeously shot by Pablo Tabernero, the movie plays like a high-end MGM melodrama if Louis B. Mayer had been a committed Marxist. Indeed, with its manly-but-sensitive Guaraní field-worker hero (Ángel Magaña, above right), evil-but-tormented plantation-owner villain (Francisco Petrone, above left), and virginal mixed-race heroine (Elisa Galvé), “Prisioneros” suggests an entire alternate Hollywood history in which the industry’s capitalist pieties might have been pro-labor instead. It’s a curio, an eye-opener, a precious ethnographic record of indigenous Guaraní life and dialect, and a pretty great movie, no more so than in the scene where the hero finally rises up and takes a whip to the plantation boss. Seriously, squint right and that’s Bogart taking on Conrad Veidt in the final reel of a Warners A-title. (Thanks and a tip of the Hatlo hat to Farran Nehme, whose Self-Styled Siren newsletter has more on this lost masterpiece.)
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