Black and white passion cabarets Burning passion, naked feelings, fatal beauties, love and blood – that’s what at all times attracted the audience to theaters, cinemas and TV screens. Unpretentious audience, you say? And then what to do with the classic Greek tragedy, where to put Shakespeare’s subjects, how to deal with “Eugene Onegin”, “Carmen”, “Anna Karenina” and so on, and so on? Yes, classical Hollywood did everything to ensure that the mandatory happy ending entered the flesh and blood of modern mass art, but it existed before Hollywood, and besides Hollywood. Whether it will exist after Hollywood, I’m not sure. In any case, what are modern Latin American soap operas, in which magazine models such as Veronica Castro or Natalia Oreiro (or who has replaced them there now) are carefully avoided on the screen. But in an era when televisions were still considered an exceptional luxury, and color cinema in theaters was a rare curiosity, everything was different.
And in countries that lay south of California and Texas, otherwise cardinal. And let this “otherness” did not allow the names of Lolita Torres, Isabel Sarley and Ninon Sevilla to go down in history along with Audrey Hepburn or Elizabeth Taylor – it makes their film heritage more valuable. And it’s not just the language (when was it an obstacle for film actors?) – in a completely different mentality and acting school, about which Stanislavsky would probably scornfully say: “I don’t believe!” But what do we care about Stanislavsky, when such fascinating events unfold on the screen and such passions boil that it is simply impossible to “outplay” them. It is possible only to “underplay”, but just this Latin American stars of black and white cinema simply could not. They didn't even want to. Mexican Ninon Sevilla - certainly.
A bright cabaret, a magnificent dancer may not have had a special dramatic talent. But her plasticity, her body language, beautiful facial expressions and scene-honed gestures made it possible to say, at times, more than the school of other actresses. And the producers and directors, who put Ninnon in a comfortable environment for her, creating roles close to her in spirit, allowed her to reveal images through a huge choreographic talent, to live in the frame as on stage. And she paid for it with a series of vivid images. However, the role of Aurora Ruiz from “Sensibility” is probably difficult to attribute to the best in the career of Ninon Seville (to the images of the voodoo priestess Yambao from the film of the same name or Norma from “The Lost” she is far away). But nothing so fully can tell about the capabilities of the actor as participation in a fairly passable film.
The plot of "Sensibility" is easily described with just two words: "Cruel romance." With a little remark in parentheses: "The story of criminal love." However, it is possible to describe, probably, 90% of the films of Ninon Seville in this way, but in "Sensibility" with these very "feelings": criminal and forbidden - there was some overkill even for Latin American cinema. The love of a puritan judge for a cabaret of ultra-light behavior looks too ... theatrical. But it leaves room for Ninon to demonstrate the brightest facet of her talent - because looking at her dance on stage, it is impossible not to fall in love with a dancer. But in the best films of the actress, her stage and dramatic images are one, whereas in Sensualidad they are the complete opposite. And that's something Ninnon doesn't always do. The insidiousness and vindictiveness of Aurora Cabaretera can be depicted with difficulty. As if poorly crusty in sin and in nothing the soul of the main character is associated with the open look of Ninon. It is in her rebirth under the influence of love, which Aurora never knew - believe. And in previous actions, no. Just as one does not believe in the brazen insolence of a whore, which Ninon has to portray in a prison cell, where the principled character of Judge Alejandro Luce placed her. Principle for which the judge had to pay cruelly after Aurora's release, but for which she paid herself, for the first time in her life succumbing to the action of feelings.
Suffering and sacrificing oneself was like breathing for Ninnon of Seville. And here's what's strange - in color cinema, it looks like ... somehow played, probably. But in black and white — not just appropriate, rather — quite natural. So it can't be any other way. An example of another film, Ninon (Yambao), would be perfect here: its color version is completely incomprehensible, while black and white looks like a real masterpiece of its time. Perhaps, therefore, with the change of the era, the young cabaretera, barely changing the fourth decade, stopped acting, returning to the screen at an already venerable age, at the end of the XXth century, when her image ceased to be associated with a bright, sensual and tragic dancer of the 50s. Ninnon Sevilla is forever in black and white cinema. And I guess that's right.