brief candles: Estelita Rodriguez (1928-1966)

   On March 12, 1966, singer and film actress Estelita Rodriguez was found dead on the kitchen floor of her home in Van Nuys, California. She was 37 years old [1]. The cause of her death remains undetermined to this day. Accounts vary: tradition maintains that she died of influenza, but other sources cite the possibility of foul play.

   Estelita Rodriguez was Cuban-born, and after being discovered in Havana nightclubs in her teens, moved to New York City with her family in the early 1940s. A few years later she found herself acting in the movies, specializing in Westerns with Roy Rogers. She remained one of the busiest and most popular actresses in the late Forties and early Fifties, albeit always in B pictures. Most of the time she was billed simply as Estelita. But in the early Fifties she more or less left movies altogether: after 1953 she only made two more films [2], one a bonafide classic and one an all-time anti-classic.

   In any event, and in a professional high point of sorts, she appeared in the Howard Hawks/John Wayne epic Rio Bravo. Filmed in 1958, it was her only A-picture, but despite her relatively high billing in the credits her part is a small one [3]. Seven years later her career came to an inglorious end with her appearance in the camp classic Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, in which she essayed the strong willed Mexican peasant girl Juanita. The film is often cited on worst movies of all time lists, but Estelita’s presence, along with that of leading lady Narda Onyx, adds some much needed energy to the absurd premise, slow pacing and otherwise indifferent cast. Alas, Estelita would not live to see her performance: her death occurred a few weeks before the film’s initial release in April 1966 [4].

   Happily there's a fairly generous sampling of Estelita’s Forties and Fifties films on YouTube, and they show her at her best: a polished performer in her peak years with lots of charisma and stage presence. The Estelita renaissance has also gotten a huge boost by the recent publication of the novel Find Me in Havana by Serena Burdick. Based on the true life of Estelita and interviews with daughter Nina, Find me in Havana tells its story through letters the two exchange.

[1] 1928 is given as her official year of birth, though some sources claim the year as early as 1915 or 1913.

[2] To be sure IMDB lists some television credits during those years.

[3] It’s our loss that Estelita doesn't sing in the film, a luxury by the way afforded Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson, who between them had two songs.

[4] Estelita was reportedly working on a cinematic biography of Lupe Velez when she died. In the film she was to portray the famed Mexican film star of the Forties.

La Habana noir : Lady Without Passport (1950)

I just caught this little-known (to me anyway) quasi-noir on TCM a few days ago. It’s the story of a tough but charming INS agent (John Hodiak), who is sent to bust up an illegal immigration ring in Bautista-era Cuba. Along the way he meets and falls for a mysterious WWII refugee (Hedy Lamarr), at the same time crossing swords with ever sinister bad guy George Macready. 

Lady Without Passport is on balance a fun movie : a tasty combination of romance* and film noir, done in the semi-documentary style popular in movies of the late Forties and early Fifties. It has the customary MGM gloss which tends to tone down the noir grittiness, bringing to mind The Bribe by the same studio, which also starred John Hodiak in a similar role (in that film Ava Gardner was the femme fatale; lucky John!). But MGM never had that much success with noir; perhaps the studio was just too civilized to capture the genre’s existential angst. Here the picture has the requisite gloomy look and familiar character types, but lacks the sinister undercurrent and aforementioned existential uneasiness.

Anyway there’s still much to savor in LWP. While clearly not the zenith of either Miss Lamarr’s or John Hodiak’s career, the film nonetheless has a quirky charm that makes it eminently watchable as it anticipates, by a decade, Our Man in Havana, another amiable if not quite memorable film.

Miss Lamarr is beautiful as always, but this was late in her career and she has a worse for the wear look which actually serves the character rather well. Her slinky cigarette girl costume recalls her role in White Cargo as the über jungle temptress Tandelayo (poor John Hodiak didn’t have a chance). 

Hodiak is perhaps best-known as the edgy socialist who becomes Talulah Bankead’s romantic interest in Lifeboat. In the noir context he is probably best remembered for Somewhere in the Night. His dusky looks work to his advantage in Havana as he poses as a ... Hungarian. And though not a conventional good-looking leading man there’s plenty of chemistry between him and Hedy. And of course there’s Macready, in a role similar to the character he played in Gilda, as the head of the human smuggling ring. He makes a deliciously effete villain. 

But the real star of the film is the all too fleeting on-location atmosphere in pre-Fidel Cuba, in which Havana is presented as a kind of sleepy, benign playground. The result is that it all tends to whitewash the rampant corruption that was going on. Probably the best, and most noirish scene is the racy dance number performed by Nita Bieber in a smoky mambo club -- pretty spicy stuff for the 1950s. There’s also, toward the end of the film, the novel setting of the Florida Everglades where a real jungle, with its own lethal charms, stands in for familiar noirish urban jungle. Also deserving mention is David Raksin’s jazzy Latino score.

The film is both pro INS and relatively sympathetic to the plight of the undocumented alien, giving the story an uncanny timeliness in our current political climate.

Further reading : Ruth Barton, Hedy Lamarr : the most beautiful woman in film, University of Kentucky Press, 2010, pp. 177-179.

* Then again all noirs are, at their core, romances, however offbeat.