Mexican directors have become prominent in Hollywood. The success in recent years of Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has brought attention to that country’s long history as a filmmaking nation and to the many Mexican actors who found work in Hollywood. Made in Mexico: Hollywood South of the Border (Applause) looks at that history from a different angle. With its close proximity to Los Angeles and terrain that lent itself to western genre backdrops, Mexico has long been the site of many Hollywood studio productions. As author Luis I. Reyes relates, the first was a 1914 docudrama on Pancho Villa with the rebel leader playing himself.
But perhaps because of low construction and operating costs, Mexico has also been the surprising location for blockbusters with no thematic Mexican or Old West connections. As one of the largest outdoor water tanks in the world, the Fox Baja Studio hosted the production of Titanic (1997) and Pearl Harbor (2001). Other films were shot in Mexico because the country was deemed a reasonable stand-in for the settings, including Steven Soderbergh’s Che (2008).
Reyes is refreshingly frank in his assessments of the several hundred movies chronicled in Made in Mexico. He calls Che “long, plodding” and adds that it demands “endurance” from the audience. Happily many undisputed masterpieces appear in the pages of Made in Mexico, including John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and Orson Welles’ Lady From Shanghai (1948). The author had written extensively on the history of Mexicans and other minorities in Hollywood.
