And we are back! I haven’t forgotten about this blog series (how could you ever think I’d forget about my beloved Ingrid?!). But, well, a lot of life has happened for everyone over the past couple years. I’m sure of few of you out there can relate.
And we have a movie that is something of a half-fulfilled quest for me.
Now, Ingrid escaped East Berlin and bounced around for a bit only to end up in Spain. She did a couple movies there, including The Sound of Horror, which we’ve already covered. But the rest of her work in Spain is rather hard to come by.
I’ve actually been looking for Un Beso en el Puerto with subtitles for something like three years.
I still haven’t found it. Finding the movie at all was difficult. Every once in awhile it pops up on Youtube and it tends to get taken down pretty quickly. After years of fussing with it, it popped up again, so I just thought, screw it, I’m watching it.
That’s the long way of saying I’m about to comment on a film I have an incomplete understanding of. Also, if you know of a place that has this with subtitles, let me know.
Now, onto the movie.
Un Beso en el Puerto (A Kiss on the Harbor) is a 1966 Manolo Escobar vehicle. He plays the very creatively named Manolo Espinor, a mechanic in a Mediterranean seaside resort who gets fired from his job because he sits around singing rather than working. That night he sees his friend Jaime who, according to what I read about the plot, makes a living scamming rich tourists by walking up to the prettiest woman he sees getting off a ship at the harbor and says, “Hi Dorothy!” and *ahem* “striking up a friendship through confusion” as one reviewer puts it.
The fact that this seems to work so well for Jaime shows that a dude wrote the movie.
Manolo decides to try this for himself and it turns out the woman he walks up to and says, “Hi Dorothy!” to is actually named Dorothy.
That’s where Ingrid comes in as Dorothy an American tourist visiting family in Spain.
They fall in love. For some reason.
From there we have what I think is a series of mistaken identity gags that keep landing Manolo in jail and some really broad humor that is not my cup of tea. In the last ten minutes of the movie, we have the obligatory moment where Manolo has another woman glomp onto him thinking he’s Jaime and Dorothy sees it and claims she wants nothing to do with Manolo. But her father explains things to her off screen. She forgives him and they drive away on a Vespa in possibly the most European ending ever.
By this point, I’m seriously wondering if I really do want to see this movie with subtitles because I’m 99.9% sure I will vehemently hate this movie if I actually understood what was going on. I’m pretty sure the only reason I tolerated it was because I didn’t really understand it.
This is a 1960’s Spanish rom-com. There is no way this movie ever would have entered my orbit if not for the fact that Ingrid is in it. General consensus even seems to be that the movie sucks and you should only see it if you are a Manolo Escobar fan or an Ingrid Pitt completist (that last bit was actually from a review, not from me).
My dad and I have this on going little war. He doesn’t really like horror movies because he says everyone in them is rock stupid. A lot of the time I can’t really argue with that. What I can do is point out that he likes rom-coms and the people in those movies are even stupider (and rom-coms don’t have dead people in them, so there). It’s really all down to what kind of the stupidity you have a tolerance for.
I have no tolerance for rom-com stupidity. None. Like, -1000 tolerance. I hate them. So this movie was never going to fly with me. The last ten minutes alone was so soul-shatteringly stupid I wanted to gouge my eyes out. And this is without even knowing precisely what was going on
This movie had big Catalina Caper vibes, only with adults, which made it kinda sad rather than charming in a silly way.
But, of course, the real point of this movie was the singing. I watched this broken up into ten 10-minute chunks (I think that flouts Youtube copyright rules or something, I see it a lot. If you can’t find a movie you’re looking for, trying looking for it in parts). Eight of those sections had Manolo singing a full on musical number. I actually do like Spanish being sung, but I guess I’m just too used to my 60’s movies being either horror or teensploitation because what kept going through my head was that the whole thing was so square. I’ve heard vaguely of Manolo Escobar and his career apparently got its start with him singing old-fashioned songs, so I guess that makes sense.
Anyway, let’s talk about Ingrid because watching her performance here was interesting.
Ingrid was almost 30 when she made this film and you could never tell because she looks young. She looked like a really youthful, typical 60’s beauty (such big hair!).
Her performance in this movie stands out really strongly the more of her later work you’ve seen.
As Dorothy, she is very expressive, animated and reactive. I can’t quite recall seeing her so expressive in any other role. It’s almost as if, when she was her younger self in Countess Dracula, she was channeling Dorothy. Dorothy plays very young and carefree. The distinction lies in the fact that Dorothy is pretty. In Ingrid’s later roles, her characters were deliberately sexy. When you’re pretty you can be silly and have fun. Sexy requires calculation and control, and, in a horror context, usually equates to villainy. Especially if the actress wants the character to not stumble over the line and create, basically, a porno. The differences in how Ingrid’s sexuality is used in The Vampire Lovers, versus Countess Dracula actually illustrates very well.
As Dorothy, she doesn’t have to rein herself in and be sexy, she just gets to have fun. She smiles a lot in this movie. She winks and has an expression for every silly thing Manolo does.
That lightness and silliness is actually a nice change from some of the later, colder roles that she’s often associated with.
Another nice change from the “only I would ever notice that” department was her make up. Her eyeliner was quite heavy and she wore bolder shades of eye shadow and lipstick that actually flattered her quite nicely. In a couple scenes she wears red lipstick and it works so well that I’m kinda shocked that all the times she played a vampire she had muted lips. Why would you do that when she looked so good in red?
One thing that legit bothered me though was, like in Countess Dracula, she was dubbed. I’m not a fan of dubbing in general and it drives me even more nuts when Ingrid gets dubbed because I love her voice. My Spanish lip reading isn’t so good, but it looked like she was speaking Spanish most of the time, so I don’t know what’s up with that.
So, this one wasn’t a winner. I’ll still probably try to find it on physical media because that’s just how I am.
You know, for all my bitching, this was an easier movie to get through than Dr. Zhivago.
The University Of The Bizarre 