Hey Ghoul Friend!
My executive assistant/unpaid intern/boyfriend and I have season passes to Alamo Drafthouse (HIGHLY recommend) and we go to a weekly series called Terror Tuesday. It's put on by this amazing non-profit, the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA).
Anyway, the organizers of Terror Tuesday program a pre show reel of relevant, sometimes super vintage movie trailers, commercials, and other video content. One of the clips stood out to me because it's classic, black and white Mexican cinema. It's a snippet from the 1975 movie Dos Fantasmas y Una Muchacha directed by Rogelio A. González.
There's a longer synopsis on Wikipedia but it's in Spanish and I'm just as pocho as Google translate. It still makes sense but here's a more condensed version from IMDb:
"At the beginning of the 20th century, two men fight a duel in a theater over a beautiful young performer. They are both killed in the duel, and after their death their ghosts haunt the theater. Many years later the ghosts run into a beautiful young girl who they believe is a descendant of the woman they fought the duel over, and they discover that she is in danger from a gang of bank robbers."
Below is the clip I'm talking about. Just felt like sharing it with you because the tune has been replaying over and over in my mind.
However, as I was going through images of the movie, I noticed something in one of the posters that I think should be mentioned. Apparently there is another musical number in the movie called "The Witch Doctor" where one of the actors portrays a caricature of an African "medicine man". It's culturally insensitive and he's depicted wearing a loin cloth, bones on his chest, and (you guessed it) blackface. (Source) This was a common practice for the time (and, unfortunately, still seen today) but I thought it was important to point out.
