Copla, melodrama and star persona in 1950s Spanish cinema: Antonio Molina and Daniel Montorio
- Autores: Celsa Alonso González
- Localización: The Routledge Handbook to Spanish Film Music / Laura Miranda González (ed. lit.), 2024, ISBN 9781003174974, págs. 131-142
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
During the Second Republic (1931–1939), the folkloric musical came into being along with the consolidation of the star system. After the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the musical film genre used songs as key elements—though they barely altered the narrative—while choreographies and choral numbers become secondary. During the 1950s, there were considerable changes in Spanish popular cinema and the musical film genre. This chapter analyzes two musical dramas with copla singer Antonio Molina (1928–1992) in the leading role, with original score and songs composed by Daniel Montorio (1904–1982): La hija de Juan Simón (1957, a new adaptation of a Republican film produced by Filmófono) and El Cristo de los Faroles (1958). Both films are excellent examples for academic study to observe the main features of Spanish musical dramas: neorealist details, the construction of the star persona, the masculinization of the copla and the “whitening” of the folkloric musical (Woods in Labanyi and Pavlovic 2013, 214). Furthermore, these films were enriched with a significant presence of incidental music—original scores closely linked to the impressive songs—which contributed to the dramatic effectiveness of the films, building hegemonic discourses about the patriarchy, although there was room for potential transgressive elements: in both cases, through powerful leitmotifs for female co-stars. These films were a consequence of the capitalist modernization of national cinema, which used popular and ethnosymbolic references to reach a mass audience, captivating working-class men and women who had abandoned their rural towns and settled in the cities that led the economic development of the late 1950s.
