The theaters, hired for the day by one of the Portuguese-American entrepreneurs, were always packed.  It made little difference to the viewers, I suspect, whether the films had intrinsic merit or not.  It sufficed that they were Portuguese films made in Portugal and that, as such, they brought the Portuguese in America into temporary contact with scenery that was Portuguese and a moral world expressed through the Portuguese language.  Three or four hours at the Hollywood in East Providence on a late Thursday afternoon watching the antics of Vasco Santana or Ribeirinho was enough to matar saudades (satisfy longings) for a while at least.

       I don’t remember any more about the matter of these films than I do about the American films I saw in those same years, perhaps even less.  Yet bits and pieces of them have remained memorable.  I recall even now, for instance, an image of Maria Papoila waving goodbye to her soldier boyfriend and confirming their next date: “até domingo, 29!” (‘till Sunday, 29). I recall, too, the middle-aged hero of Um Homem às Direitas (The Right Kind of Man) feeding his righteous and confident line to the young girl he would marry, trying to convince her that the stability and comfort an old codger like him would bring to their marriage would eventually lead her to love him.  (Boy, did my middle-aged uncle go for that one, analyzing the seduction scene, as he did, at tiresome length.)  And I remember a bit in a factory in which a young man quickly sketches the face of a young woman worker and then hurriedly crumples the paper and tosses it aside.  But his approaching boss recovers the paper, which now has assumed the shape of a bar of soap with the face showing clearly on top. Of course he wants to know who is responsible for the sketch for this is exactly the illustrative figure he needs to sell his soap.  That it was a success story for the young poor man I recognized right off, I think, but even now I marvel at the luck involved in so rumpling the paper that it would take the shape of a bar of soap with the lineaments of the beautiful young woman uppermost, face-up.  Then there was the pathetic story of the picador, drunk, at the bar… 

      It is not surprising, therefore, that when ten of these films were brought back to the United States some fifty years later under the auspices of the Portuguese Cultural Foundation, directed by Regina Emerson, they once again played to packed houses.   Doubled nostalgia (for the films themselves and for my childhood experience) as well as a new curiosity as to how they stood up after all this time once again attracted me to them.  This time my reaction to them was less naïve or innocent than previously.  Now I saw them with a more critical eye, and wrote about them accordingly. 

      In A Aventura do Cinema Português (The Portuguese Cinema Adventure) (1977), the film historian Luis de Pina, recognizes the 1940s as a period of high national achievement in the Portuguese cinema. “The most representative work of the decade,” he writes, “attests to a cinema that is ‘right’ technically, produced with ease, well-received by the public, and working within a limited compass but worthwhile and coherent within those limits.  If the cinema is perforce the reflection of a society, even when its reflection is indirect, the films of the 1940s mirror and reflect, with the fidelity then possible, the surface of Portuguese life at that time.”  That seems to get it just about right, but does not go far enough.  There is something going on in many of these films that invites further exploration and description, an encoded content that gives the lie to the mirror-images so superficially given off for the benefit of a public that would be entertained and a censor’s office that must see to it that the state’s values be affirmed, not challenged, its instru­ments and institutions upheld, if not actually praised.        

      0 Pátio das Cantigas (The Courtyard of Song) (1942) opens with a series of shots that establishes symbolic conflicts of will and a cultural clash over musical preferences. An affluent druggist, a widower and the father of a rather silly daughter of marriageable age, owner of the only gramophone in the neighborhood, affects opera, a foreign musical form but one which he thinks good for the people.  “Opera,” as he puts it, “é bom p’ra os operários.”  In playing his opera records for his neighbors and insisting that opera is good for workers, he is both trying to improve the general taste and asserting his superiority to his neighbors.  This seemingly sets a pattern for the rest of the film; always the popular Portuguese music, including the fado, asserts itself against any foreign challenge, be it Italian, Spanish, Brazilian or-in a snatch or two-American.       

      This much was calculated, one suspects, to get the film that approval of Antonio Salazar’s ministry of propaganda.  But it does more: the closure reinforces and cinches the patriotic theme.  Everybody-well almost everybody-is paired off.  There are no less than five weddings impending: a widower and his son to, respectively, a widow and her daughter; two brothers and two sisters; a young woman and her father’s clerk.  In one instance, in fact, there is presented the remarkable case of a rich, handsome, highly successful radio singer and a nightclub performer in Brazil who gives it all up for marriage to the proprietor of a dairy-products store.  She trades all of Brazil, it seems-car, jewels, furs, fame-for the love of a modest businessman in the pátio where she was raised (and nurtured).  The couples all appear at windows to close the film.  The trap has been sprung, and all the lovebirds (and songbirds) are safely in-house-where they belong.  There will be no flying off to Rio.  There is no need to do so when all is hunky-dory in the pátio/ pátria.       

      All this, of course-opening and closure, particularly-served the purposes of the ministry set up to propagandize for the state.  As such, moreover, O Pátio das Cantigas hardly distinguished itself from most of the other Portuguese films of the day.  Yet this film deserves singling out, for on one or two occasions it wriggles free from the Salazarist national line to land a satiric blow or two.  To be sure, these kicks against the pricks are mild enough by current standards, but they are nevertheless real.  They are there to be seen now even as they were always there for those who saw the subtlety that effectively escaped the censor.  

        Anyone looking today at Portugal’s films of the 1940s cannot help noticing how often people in those films, particularly O Patio das Cantigas, are imprisoned or threatened with imprisonment.  In João Ratão (1940), for example, the titular hero is jailed and, at the end, it is implied that the two townsmen who have conspired against him will be denounced and imprisoned; while in O Pai Tirano (The Tyrannical Father) (1941) everyone unlucky enough to be on camera at the end of the movie is marched off to jail (gleefully, to be sure, since all one’s friends are going, too), a conclusion foreshadowed when we see the comic romantic lead behind bars after tangling with his wealthy, better-stationed rival.  No matter that the jailing is the viewer’s illusion (though it is suggested that the character feels incarcerated), for the camera moves back slowly to show us that he is really hanging on the bars of an iron fence.  As for the “arrest everyone” motif, it reappears in A Menina da Rádio (The Girl on the Radio) (1944) when a policeman, exasper­ated over a minor incident, threatens to pull in everyone that happens to be around.  The immediate establishment of order is paramount, one senses.  Let all legal guilt take care of itself; things will fall into place eventually.  For the moment, however, the broad brush of the law says that everyone is involved and guilty enough, just from being around, to be marched off to prison.        

      The prison image, hovering as it does over the events depicted in João Ratão and 0 Pai Tirano, takes a more assertive place in 0 Pátio das Cantigas, for a crime takes place at a crucial point in the plot.  A robbery of 15$000 escudos, with a consequent false accusation, leads to the arrest of one of the young men of the neighborhood.  We see him being arrested by a plainclothesman just as he is returning home and led away.  It’s a long camera shot and we do not hear what the two men say to each other.  All we see is the policeman’s identifying himself by papers drawn from an inside pocket in his suit coat, some conversation, and their walk away together.  We do notice that the accused man has his arm held briefly before he is given a little push forward.  Later, two plainclothes-men (rather ordinary-looking men, forty or so, in suits and wearing soft hats) will search the culprit’s rooms, finding an incriminating amount of money under a mattress.  It’s all a mistake, of course-he has borrowed the money, somebody else has committed the robbery-which soon gets cleared up.  At which time the police say, “Don’t worry, we’ll get the thief.  See, the police are not as bad as some people think.”  The money-lender then laments: “They are releasing the young man, but they are putting my fifteen grand in the Torél [a notorious jail].”   Never have the police displayed anything other than quiet, if firm, and profes­sionally good manners.  They have brandished no guns.  In fact, the only gun shown anywhere is the empty bottle the dairy-bar owner holds to the druggist’s back in the midst of a festival riot as he directs him toward a wire-enclosed chicken coop and locks him in.      

      This is not the only image of imprisonment, moreover.  At one moment, a man stops briefly to show off the cricket he is carrying home in a cage, only to hear comments about its singing.  (There is also a caged canary in the soldier’s hovel just behind the trenches in João Ratão.  There, of course, the image also carries the further meaning that in World War I the canary, by its behav­ior, or death, would serve to warn soldiers of the deadly presence of poison gasses.)  But the most telling use of the prison metaphor occurs at the end of the festival riot already mentioned.  The riot itself is presented as a mini-war with fireworks so filmed as to look like the aerial bombardment accom­panying the hand-to-hand combat in the square.  The final image of the riot, however, is one superficially intended to convey notions of safety and security.  The neighborhood drunk, carrying a child in his arms, leads the neighborhood children to a cart in which he nestles them all quietly in orderly rows.  Over the top of the cart, we see written, as the camera pans upward to reveal, the legend Salazar.  The symbol promises benevolent, encompassing safety for its denizens.  If its denizens are children and if their piper is a pie-eyed sot-what of it?  But there’s more.  The drunkard, for all his humorous antics, is also-as we had learned previously-the adult leader in a three-penny opera involving many of the same children.  With his sturdy, businesslike, officious, eye-glassed “man” in the field, the drunkard heads up a syndicalism-like organization of street beggars.  From behind the scenes, the benevolent prince of thieves runs his operations, firing the laggards, rewarding the profitably industrious, and instructing his lieutenant at the last to get him a whole new crew to work the upcoming saint’s day feast because “this bunch has been taking advantage” of him.  Even this neighborhood leader of spurious beggars has to keep on his toes to insure the honesty of his people.  The pátio, one might think, is a microcosm.  As in the neighborhood, it would seem, so be it in the nation.      

       Less subtle in its employment of the imprisonment image cluster, O Amor de Perdição (Desperate Love) (1943), a ponderous, somber effort, opens with the image of a moving coach, which comes to a stop before a large building.  The edifice is a prison and the passenger who steps out of the stopped coach has come to turn himself in.  A pretentious costume drama with its pervasive darkness, spiritual and scenic, this film features a Montague-Capulet love intrigue with its attendant parade of deaths, always motivated by passion and loyalty, whether violent or natural.  It aims for tragedy.  Gates, bars, heavy doors and other images of imprisonment, enclosure, and exclusion abound, whether those of the nunnery, the prison house, or the old homestead, always there to separate people and keep them apart.  If these social appurtenances seem to be there because they are givens of nineteenth-century literary romance, they also nevertheless serve to remind viewers, almost disingenuously, that life is about hopeless loves, doomed loyalties, unrequited attachments, incarceration, separation, exile, and finalities beyond the grave.  It would be easy to overstress this notion; after all, the film does derive from a classic nineteenth-century narrative and it does treat that narrative with more than a modicum of fidelity to the written word.  It should not be discounted, however, that this book and not another was selected for filming in the 1940s and that these were the themes insisted upon, both visually and in the narrative.

(cont…)