Queer and insufficiently Spanish: tensions of gender and national identity around the transnational stardom of Luis Mariano

ABSTRACT

During the 1950s, Luis Mariano was the main star of French film musicals. Born in Spain, but exiled to France after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the artist starred in several successful French-Spanish co-productions such as Andalousie/El sueño de Andalucía (1951), Violettes impériales/Violetas imperiales (1952) or Le chanteur de Mexico/El cantor de México (1956). This article analyses Luis Mariano’s stardom from a transnational perspective. Although some French scholars have started to study it within the framework of French cinema, Luis Mariano’s stardom worked in very different ways in Spain, as it implied and generated multiple tensions related to gender, queerness and national identity. Moreover, these tensions caused the introduction of changes in the films to adapt them to the Spanish audiences. Through the analysis of films, reviews, press articles, censorship documents and biographies, among other media texts, this article compares the results of the research on Luis Mariano in France with the investigation of his stardom in Spain, in order to evidence different relationships of the audiences of each country with the star and how he was read and received in diverse ways in each national context.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer studies
• homosexuality
• national identity
• gender
• transnationality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Bart de Rauw for the final proofreading of this article.

Notes

¹ All translations from French and Spanish have been made by the author.

² To make the text easier to read, I name the films in French, except when I write about the Spanish versions.

³ This can be related to the ethnocentric presentation of Latin characters in Hollywood musicals of the classical era: ‘The ethnic character […] is by necessity a performative subject that must enact and re-enact his or her cultural identity. […] Latino/as and Latin Americans appeared most often as exotic performers rather than ‘regular’ citizens driven by love to sing and dance their passions’ (1997, 316).

⁴ ‘Nunca es tarde si la dicha es buena’, a Spanish proverb, in the original.

⁵ ‘Me lo dijo por si colaba’, in the original.

⁶ See page 29 of Tuesday 25 March 1958.

⁷ Documents available in box AGA,36,04731 of the Archivo General de la Administración (General Archive of the Spanish Administration).

⁸ In this scene, Luis Mariano walks singing while selling ceramics. The women of the village hear him approaching and break their ceramics, so that they have an excuse to approach him. In the Spanish version, this is suppressed: Luis Mariano appears singing directly and the women are practically not seen. In a shot where some female neighbours enjoy watching him, a man is added to make fun of their desire: ‘Much sighing but no one buys anything from him!’. They respond by sighing ridiculously in unison. Later, Luis Mariano scolds the women for following him. The feminine desire is thus denied in three ways: shots in which it is visible are suppressed, the voices of rejection of two male figures are placed in front of it, and it is openly taken as an object of mockery.

⁹ Not all the modifications have to do with Luis Mariano: for example, some musical numbers of secondary characters or a fragment in which the actress Annie Cordy appears half-dressed are omitted.

¹⁰ Documents available in boxes AGA,36,04766, AGA,36,03586 and AGA,36,03587 of the Archivo General de la Administración.

¹¹ According to the website eldoblaje.com, Luis Mariano was dubbed in all his films released in Spain; however, this is the only film in which he was dubbed by such a renowned actor (see http://www.eldoblaje.com/datos/FichaActorOriginal.asp?id=6627).

Additional information

Funding

This research has been developed within the Research Project ‘Cinematic Cartographies of Mobility in the Hispanic Atlantic’ [CS2017-85290-P], financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain (State Research Agency) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)