my man and i

Nov 16 movie: My Man and I. On Tuesday Sylvia and I had another Ricardo Montalban night. This time her very cool friend Hilary joined us and we ate at Sitar India Palace beforehand, which was yum, then watched Sylvia's favorite Montalban movie, My Man and I. This was a touching story about Montalban as a Mexican immigrant who is thrilled to be a US citizen, then is cheated and falsely accused of assault by a chiseling white farmer and his wife. Also Montalban falls in love with Shelley Winters, a troubled young woman who can't seem to handle someone being nice to her.

I was impressed that this movie handled racial issues head-on. Maybe it's because I mainly watch older movies from the 30s and 40s, which generally wouldn't be so overt as to have the white bad guys using racial slurs against the hardworking Latino, to his face no less. Also the relationship between Montalban and Winters wasn't softpedaled. Montalban romanced white women throughout his hollywood career, but typically as the exotic "latin lover" (that was even the title of one of his movies) suitable for a summer fling. In My Man and I he wants to marry Winters, and it looks like he'd be good for her too. That's pretty forward for 1952. Winters, as always, blew me away. She had an amazing ability to be real, even if it made her unglamorous or even unattractive. How many Hollywood actresses would have been willing to play the parts she did, much less play them convincingly?