PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC

ALAMBRISTA! (Also Blu-ray) (Three and a Half Stars)

U.S.: Robert M. Young, 1977 (Criterion Collection)

Alambrista! — a moving and perceptive cinematic tale of a Mexican illegal immigrant and his odyssey over the border — is a movie that almost defines American film realism in the ‘70s. Those were the years, of course. of the B.B.S. films (Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show), of John Cassavetes’ ultra-real psycho-dramas and of the classic cinema verite-style documentaries of Frederick Wiseman, D. A, Pennebaker and the Maysles Brothers. But few American dramatic films went as far as Alambrista! — shot neo-realist-style on the fringes of the industry with a modest budget and few constraints.

The result is a film that hasn’t really aged. Alambrista! won the first Cannes Film Festival Camera d‘Or (for best first film), and it still seems relevant and fresh — a picture made with compassion and few commercial compromises,  one that still shows us a lot about Latino working class culture and the lives and plight of illegal immigrants. Told though the eyes of the young border-crasher Roberto (Domingo Ambriz), it’s a movie that doesn’t look phony or contrived (except for the somewhat implausible plot twist toward the end involving Roberto’s father), despite the fact that most of the movie is Spanish language (subtitled), and that it was written and directed by an Anglo-American from New York who didn’t speak Spanish: Robert M. Young.

Young had already worked as a nonfiction film-maker and as writer, producer and cinematographer, on Nothing But a Man, director Michael Roemer‘s much-praised 1964 low-budget fictional drama of lower-middle-class African American life. When he made Alambrista!, Young took much of his aesthetic from American indie drama, the socially conscious TV documentaries he had worked on for much of his career before 1977, and Italian neo-realism, from which he borrowed the strategy of shooting a fictional film on real locations with a mix of professional actors and real people.

Nothing But a Man, which was also influenced by neo-realism, had used, to very good effect, a cast with professionals Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln, Yaphet Kotto and Julius Harris. Alambrista, the more cinematic of the two films, was shot in Mexico and Texas, with a mixed cast. The pros include Ambriz and Trinidad Silva (as his traveling buddy Joe), both of whom later worked on “Hill Street Blues” — and established actors as well: Harris, who plays a drunk, and Ned Beatty, the prolific supporting star who had already sone his big roles in Deliverance and Network, and appears here as the nervous Anglo Coyote who bosses Roberto’s second incursion.

Thanks to the actors, the locations and Young’s strong, vigorous visual style, Alambrista! has a powerful sense of place and truth and it‘s also genuinely suspenseful and dramatic. Roberto isn‘t a congenital criminal. He’s a poor Mexican fallen on hard times and he’s looking for money to send back to his wife and family, nd we follow him through his encounters with other illegal workers, and with the ordinary or extraordinary citizens in Texas whom he meets — from the coyotes like Beatty who get him across, to the fruit-crop employers who hire him, to waitress Sharon (Linda Gillen) who befriends him and provides the film with a little adulterous romance. Through it all, we get a lasting impression of a world of outsiders, of desperate lives, dangerously lived.

At one point, Roberto and his friend Joe hop a freight, lying on the cross-spans underneath a car, and Roberto, at their stop, sees that his friend is gone, probably fallen off and killed during the ride. Young doesn’t dwell on the moment. (Neither does Roberto.) But it gives us a jolting sense of how perilous his situation really is. Like the other illegal workers, Roberto has forfeited the protection of society and lives in constant danger of being caught, deported or worse.

!Alambrista! (the official title has two exclamation points, with the first one upside down) wss a box office failure in 1977. Indeed, despite its high Cannes Festival award, it never got regular distribution, and was largely seen by audiences at colleges and through community organizations. The film was rescued in 1999 by Young and two fans/academics, David Varrasco and Nicholas J. Cull; Young recut part of the movie, and it was released as an ambitious book/DVD package in 2004 by the University of New Mexico Press.

I didn‘t see it in 1977, when I should have caught it at the Universiy of Wisconsin-Madison (where I saw most of the big political films and lots of others too as a young movie buff on one of the top movie campuses). But I remembeer the names (and the exclamation points). And I remember Young’s other ‘70s films: the prison drama Short Eyes and One Trick Pony (with writer-star Paul Simon singing his original song score), and Rich Kids (set among the wealthy kids of Young’s home turf, New York City.) He’s a filmmaker I’ve always respected, more so after seeing Alambrista!

The Criterion edition of Alambrista also contains Children of the Fields (1973), the NBC White Paper documentary on Mexican migrant workers, by Young, which inspired and led the way to his later feature. It’s fascinating to see how he carries the documentary techniques he uses in Children, over into Alambrista!, just as Ken Loach was doing in the ‘70s in Britain with Kes: the mobile camera work, the fluid cutting, the unscripted-sounding dialogue (real or improvised). That movie realism takes us deep into Roberto’s experiences and into the world of him and his fellow border crossers. We feel in the end that many of them are less predators than victims, and that’s probably true.

“Alambrista” means “tightrope walker” and it’s both a gentle film and sometimes a tragic, painful one. Perhaps it was too real for the 1977 studios who wouldn’t distribute it, though the ‘70s were the heydays of the real and the political in American movies..

Watching the film brought me back to my youth, my college days, back to Madison and an afternoon I once spent in Tijuana, when I was 12. It reminded me of how I felt in Chicago, 1968, reminded me of the violent but hopeful days of the antiwar movement, the crusades, which also part of the 70s and ‘60s. I haven’t been as hopeful since.

The poor and marginalized were treated badly then. They‘re treated badly now. So are the elderly, and the minorities or outsiders of every race and sex. (The new breed of rich kids, or kids-become-rich, go on TV and make jokes and laugh about what they call, stupidly, class warfare.) But back in 1977, Young and Alambrista!  fought, or tried to fight, with the weapons of art and truth, for many of those marginalized people. So did most of my friends, in the days of our education, our youth, when we marched and cried, naively I guess, things like “Power to the people!” Right on. (In Spanish and English, with English subtitles.)

Also:  Children of the Fields (U.S.: Robert M. Young, 1973) Three Stars. Young’s NBC White Paper documentary on an average family of Latino migrant workers, the Galindos, was the film that eventually led him to !Alambrista!; the father, Jose Galindo worked as an advisor on that later film. Played without narration, focusing on the Galindo kids (it was part of a continuing White Paper series on children around the world), the movie is remarkable for its compassion, empathy and visual beauty. In English. With interview with Young.

Extras: Commentary by Young and !Alambrista! Composer Michael Hausman; Interview with Edward James Olmos; Trailer; Booklet with essay by Charles Ramirez Berg.

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