Cantinflas (1911–1993) was one of Mexico's most beloved cinematic figures, a masterful comedian who cast himself as the resourceful voice of the common people. With a stream of his trademark non-sense talk, he could neutralize the powerful or work around the most absurd forms of bureaucracy.
That nonsense talk was so well known that by the end of his life Spanish dictionaries listed a new verb, cantinflear, meaning to talk a lot without really saying anything. Cantinflas released some 45 films over his long career, gaining some recognition among English-speaking audiences when he appeared in the 1956 crowd-pleaser Around the World in 80 Days. Often considered a Mexican counterpart to silent-film comedian Charlie Chaplin—an impression reinforced when Chaplin, according to the Houston Chronicle, called him "the greatest co-median alive"—Cantinflas actually blended verbal comedy in a way that recalled various figures of early English-language cinema without resembling any of them closely.
Performed on Streets
The youngest of eight surviving children in his family, Cantinflas (cahn-TEEN-flas) was born Mario Moreno Reyes August 12, 1911, in Mexico City. His father, a post office worker, hoped for professional success for his son and enrolled him in good schools. But Cantinflas preferred to watch the Mexican capital's numerous street performers and, as soon as he was old enough, to try to imitate their tricks and acrobatic feats. Although he did not grow up in extreme poverty, he soon gained sympathy for those who did. Cantinflas was sent to a government agricultural school when he was 15, but he dropped out to join a carpa—the Mexican version of the American tent show.
For a while, Cantinflas was a jack-of-all trades after dropping out of school. He acquired his unusual stage name, which had no real meaning in Spanish, very early on. Several stories have circulated as to its origin, but he seems to have derived it from "En la cantina, tu inflas" (In a bar, you drink), a line that amused him when it was hurled his way by a drunken heckler one night in a bar. He was looking for a stage name, anyhow, for he still hoped to hide his performing career from his parents. Cantinflas was active as both a boxer and a bullfighter, activities that demanded quick thinking.
In the bull ring, Cantinflas was a torero bufo, a comic matador so popular that pawnshops had to be closed to stop poor fans from putting their possessions in hock so they could see him perform. Later, in films (including Around the World in 80 Days) he performed versions of his bullfighting routine, in which he would walk into the ring, head buried in a newspaper, and remain motionless until the charging bull was inches away. Cantinflas was a ham in the boxing ring as well, and on stage in the tent shows he was popular as a dancer.
None of these appearances required him to speak much, however, and one night when he filled in for a sick friend as a tent show's emcee he was seized with stage fright. As he tried to deliver his lines, he began to talk nervously and rapidly, saying the first thing that came into his mind just so that he could keep going. The audience, thinking that the rapid-fire patter was part of his routine, started to laugh, and Cantinflas kept on dishing up more of it. As he refined his unexpectedly successful act, the central part of his performing personality was born. His nonsense speech was a mixture of double-talk, mangled high-class mannerisms, malapropism, and pantomime, at which he always excelled—one of his specialties was a full-scale game of pool, with no table, balls, or cue stick. In a country with a small hereditary aristocracy and a growing urban underclass, Cantinflas used his nonsense speech to twit upper-class ways.
Joined Follies Bergère
Cantinflas climbed his way up the theatrical ladder and in 1935 joined the cast of the Follies Bergère variety show in Mexico City. He made his first film appearance the following year in No te engañes, corazón (Don't Kid Yourself, Sweetheart), but the film had little success. In 1937 he married Valentina Ivanova Zubareff, the daughter of a Russian-born tent show owner. The two stayed together until Valentina's death in 1966 and raised a son, Mario. Valentina urged Cantinflas to keep trying to crack the growing world of cinema, and he appeared in several more films. In the late 1930s he made a series of comic short subjects in which he was featured in a short story but that were essentially commercials for various products, shown along with newsreels between film presentations. The director of these films signed Cantinflas to make two full-length features, Ahí está el detalle (Here's the Point, 1940) and Ni sangre ni arena (Neither Blood Nor Sand, 1941). These films had Mexicans lining up in the street and outgrossed the top imported comedy of 1941, Chaplin's The Great Dictator; it was apparently Ni sangre ni arena that inspired Chaplin to put Cantinflas's talents above his own.
Cantinflas and two partners formed their own production company, Posa Films, and between 1941 and the mid-1950s he regularly released one or more films every year. His persona was that of the pelado (the word means "one who is broke"), the down-and-out but resourceful son of the Mexico City streets. Like Chaplin, Cantinflas had a trademark moustache (his was pencil-thin), and he sometimes wore a hat made of newspaper. He could gain unlimited comic mileage out of the old vaudeville technique of wearing a pair of pants held up by a length of string, always threatening to fall down. Combining physical and verbal comedy, he was, in the words of Octavio Roca of the San Francisco Chronicle, "all the Marx Brothers rolled into one."
Another way in which Cantinflas resembled the great comedians of American cinema was that he mastered the trick of playing different characters in each new film but still keeping a consistent personality that came through to the audience. "Cantinflas had a pact with his audience," wrote Houston Chronicle reporter Fernando Dovalina. "Even though Cantinflas never stepped out of his character while he was on, the whole act was done with a knowing, subtle, and unseen nod to the common people. He was one of them. The adults could laugh at the witticisms-with-a-wink, and the children could laugh at the farce." Such films as El circo (The Circus, 1942), Un día con el diablo (One Day with the Devil, 1945), El mago (The Magician, 1948), and Abajo el telóon (Bring Down the Curtain, 1954) were consistent hits. By 1951 Cantinflas was so popular that a mural of Mexican heroes by artist Diego Rivera depicted him in its center panel.
Dovalina saw Cantinflas's films as a child in south Texas in the 1940s, and they became very popular in Mexican-American neighborhoods north of the border. Cantinflas's verbal routines, however, were impossible to translate into English, and he remained unknown among English-speaking audiences. Cantinflas frequently traveled to the United States, however, and he later acquired homes in the Los Angeles and Houston areas. Cantinflas made powerful American friends, including then Congressman Lyndon Johnson of Texas. In 1966, when Cantinflas's wife was suffering from cancer, the by-then-President Johnson sent a jet to bring her to the U.S. for treatment.
Appeared as Valet
There was obviously potential profit to be made if Cantinflas's popularity could be expanded into the English-speaking world, but the comedian's grasp of English was shaky, and the right opportunity never came along. Finally, in 1956, Cantinflas was cast, over the initial objections of director Michael Todd, in the adventure romance Around the World in 80 Days. Cantinflas played the role of Passepartout, a valet to well-heeled traveler Phineas Fogg (David Niven). Passepartout was intended to be of French origin, but Cantinflas convinced Todd that a change in nationality would work, and, moreover, would give him the chance to trot out one of his comic bullfighting routines. His intuition was vindicated when Around the World in 80 Days became an international hit and earned Cantinflas a Golden Globe award for best actor in a musical or comedy.
Meanwhile, Cantinflas suffered no slowdown in his Spanish-language career, Sube y baja (Up and Down,1958), in which he played an elevator attendant, achieved some international distribution. An attempt to use Cantinflas in a starring English role was unsuccessful, however; Pepe, which starred the comedian as a ranch hand who takes off for Hollywood to try to find a prize horse who has been sold to an alcoholic film director, was a big-budget flop despite the presence of a roster of stars (Bing Crosby, Shirley Jones, Jack Lemmon, Janet Leigh, Jimmy Durante, and many others). Cantinflas returned to the Mexican market, now sometimes working in Hollywood. He released new films consistently through the 1960s, ending his career with Patrullero 777 (Patrolman 777, 1977) and El barrendero(The Street Cleaner, 1981). He made one more appearance in the Mexican television film México … estamos contigo (Mexico, We Are With You) in 1985.
By that time Cantinflas, who had invested his money cannily and sheltered some of it in offshore locations to avoid Mexican taxes, was a wealthy man. Part of his mystique among Mexicans grew from his generosity in plowing money back into neighborhoods like the one in which he had grown up. His annual charitable donations were once estimated at $175,000. At one point he single-handedly supported 250 families in the Mexico City neighborhood of Granjas, and he built and sold off dozens of low-cost housing units.
In his later years Cantinflas lived off and on in Houston. He carried on a relationship there with an American woman, Joyce Jett, and largely stayed out of the limelight. He remained a folk hero in Mexico, however, and appeared on television in that country with Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari over the 1992 holiday season. After a lung cancer diagnosis, he died in Mexico City on April 20, 1993. Salinas, according to Mike Reid of the London Guardian, called him "a Mexican legend," and his funeral service, initially planned to be restricted to family and close friends, was crowded with thousands of Mexicans great and small.
Cantinflas's reputation continued to grow after his death. Several Spanish-language books chronicled the co-median's career, and an English-language academic study, Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity, sought to relate his film comedy to the tremendous social changes that had overtaken Mexico during his career. A biographical, bilingual play, Cantinflas!, was presented in San Francisco and Houston, and it seemed that, despite the continuing language barrier, one of the great comic figures in the popular culture of the 20th century was becoming better known outside Latin America.
Books
Contemporary Hispanic Biography, vol. 4, Gale, 2003.
Pilcher, Jeffrey M., Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity, Scholastic Resources, 2001.
Stavans, Ilan, The Riddle of Cantinflas: Essays on Hispanic Popular Culture, University of New Mexico Press, 1998.
Periodicals
Guardian (London, England), April 23, 1993.
Houston Chronicle, April 23, 1993; September 21, 1993.
Independent (London, England), April 24, 1993.
Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2001.
New York Times, April 22, 1993.
San Francisco Chronicle, September 17, 2002.
Times (London, England), April 22, 1993.
Variety, April 22, 1993.
Online
"Cantinflas," All Movie Guide, http://www.allmovie.com (January 22, 2006).
