Their subsequent relationship was volatile, with Vélez apparently uncertain what to do, but in the early hours of December 14 she took an overdose of barbiturates, and later that morning her secretary, Beulah Kinder, found her lying peacefully in bed, as if in a deep sleep. In 1944 she met a young Austrian actor, Harald Ramond, and became pregnant by him. Vélez’s personal life included highly public affairs with John Gilbert, Clark Gable, Charlie Chaplin, Gary Cooper, and other famous actors, as well as a five-year marriage to Johnny “Tarzan” Weissmuller in the mid-’30s. Although today her fiery “Tabasco” Latin temperament, assertive sexuality, broken English, and overall exoticism might be seen as promoting racist stereotypes, Latino, feminist, and queer artists and critics have proposed that in her historical moment she was in various ways empowering for minorities.
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Her popularity declined somewhat after the Motion Picture Production Code necessitated a toning down of her vibrant, at times risqué, repartee, but the box-office success of The Girl from Mexico (Leslie Goodwins, 1939) crystallized her comedic talents into what would become an iconic role: that of the “Mexican Spitfire.” She deployed this character again in 1940 as the star of a film of that name, and then in six more ( Mexican Spitfire Out West, The Mexican Spitfire’s Baby, etc.), all directed by Goodwins. DeMille, Gregory La Cava, and other important directors, as well as in Broadway musicals. All three films are gossipy and spiteful, focusing on the most public scandals associated with their respective subjects, their weaknesses and failings, and, in the case of Lupe, a wholly spurious and degrading misrepresentation of its protagonist’s death.īeginning in the silent era and continuing into the 1930s, Vélez worked in B movies, mostly screwball comedies, for William Wyler, Cecil B.
The three stars’ on-screen personae as highly sexualized and aggressively desiring women were matched by their tempestuous and often-scandalous personal lives. Based on the life of Lupe Vélez (1908–1944), one of the first Mexican actresses to achieve great success in Hollywood, Lupe is the second of three films Warhol made about famous Hollywood actresses, the others being More Milk, Yvette (1965), his immediately previous melodrama about Lana Turner and her gangster lover Johnny Stompanato, and the following year’s Hedy (1966), about Hedy Lamarr and her highly publicized shoplifting trial, both featuring Mario Montez. Warhol’s fascination with the culture industries was a profoundly generative influence on his art. The coexistence and interaction in Lupe of elements from the avant-garde and the industrial feature generate a thematic and formal richness absent from the more extreme poles of his cinema.
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On the other hand, Warhol’s willingness to project it as either a quasi-theatrical linear movie or a multiscreen installation marked the emergence of a new phase of his art-world innovations. Made at the end of 1965indeed, just last month celebrating its fiftieth anniversary Lupe found the artist midway through this transition: Using a script commissioned from a well-known playwright about a Hollywood star, photographed in color, and boasting sound recorded with a level of near competence uncharacteristic of his previous work, the film was relatively accessible to a general public. Finally, with Paul Morrissey’s Heat (1972) and Flesh for Frankenstein (1973), Warhol became a producer of narratives designed to compete with Hollywood on its own terms. His entrée into the world of avant-garde film was secured with Sleep (1963), which presented an alternative to the commercial cinema as uncompromising as any of Brakhage’s work, but over the next decade he turned increasingly toward Hollywood in terms of subject matter, genre, style, and mode of production. But within experimental-film circles, the same period also witnessed various dialogues and other productive relations with Hollywood, and Andy Warhol was, no doubt, the poster child of this tendency. THE CLASSIC ERA of American avant-garde cinemaa tradition exemplified by Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekaswas dominated by filmmakers who forged practices outside and opposed to the institutions and styles of the film industry. To hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature. © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. Andy Warhol, Lupe, 1965, 16 mm, color, sound, 72 minutes double-screen projection, 36 minutes.
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