Una Golfa

As prostitute Diana, Silvia Pinal lights up the screen with confidence, charm, and passion — think Holly Golightly meets Carmen Miranda in the slums of Mexico City — in Tulio Demicheli’s Una Golfa, which loosely translates to “A Whore,” a late-cycle cabaretera gangster noir. Working her corner, penniless with no prospects, Diana stumbles upon the kindness of a stranger, a trumpet player named Luis (Sergio Bustamante in his first film role), who offers her shelter and friendship in his capacious yet filthy apartment, even opening doors for her as a performer at the club where he works. They fall in love, of course, and must choose between their simple lives together and the world of drugs and crime to which they’ve become accustomed, in particular Don Emiliano (Carlos Lopez Moctezuma), who runs a drug dealing operation out of the club and whose eventual demise will destroy the happy couple. While centered on the Diana-Luis relationship, including a few moments of sappy romantic melodrama complete with the notes of angelic choirs, this is a dark tale that implies that criminality is a permanent state and that redemption, if there even is any, can only come from the Church. Watch for the extended sequence that depicts Luis’s state of mind after smoking a joint.