Salón México

A bleak film noir with a heart-breaking denouement, Emilio Fernández’ Salón México, elevated by the cinematography of Mexican legend Gabriel Figueroa, beautifully contrasts good and evil in a tale of two settings: the bright, pastoral boarding school where young and innocent Beatriz (Silvia Derbez) studies alongside well-bred Catholic girls, and the dark, violent city slums in which the older Mercedes (Marga López) works secretly as a prostitute to pay for her sister’s schooling. While Mercedes was able to keep these two worlds separate for a while, everything changes when she steals her own hard-earned money from the wallet of her pimp Paco (Rodolfo Acosta), who threatens to tell Beatriz and her schoolmates about her big sister’s criminal life. Fernández brilliantly uses Mexico City as an enormous set piece — notably the bustling El Salón México nightclub, the cathedral, the government palace — from which Mercedes escapes to a stunning studio set of her gray, vertical, dilapidated tenement building. Miguel Inclán plays policeman Lupe, who’s in love with Mercedes but settles for the role of protective friend (“Gold is valuable wherever it is, even in the garbage,” he says.) Note the use of festival fireworks as a dramatic escape backdrop just as we find in another 1949 noir, The Bribe.