Macario, a 1960 Mexican film restored in 2023 with funding from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (now Golden Globe Foundation), was shown at the Eagle Rock theater on Saturday November 2 to celebrate the Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos), in a program that included the animated Coco, Beetlejuice by Tim Burton, and Ghost.
The historic 1929 movie theater was renovated by Vidiots, that reopened their legendary video rental store next door in July 2023, after its Santa Monica location closed in 2015.
Macario, directed by Roberto Gavaldón, starring Ignacio López Tarso and Pina Pellicer, is based on the 1953 short story The Third Guest by B. Traven, pen name of a German writer living in Mexico, who reworked the 1812 Brothers Grimm fairy tale Godfather Death.
A poor indigenous woodcutter, who lives with his wife and five young children in a hut by the forest in colonial Mexico, walks to town with his family, a bushel of wood strapped on his back to sell to the baker. When he sees 6 turkeys roasting in the ovens for the wealthy Don Ramiro, he becomes obsessed with eating one all by myself, since he often has to grow hungry to leave some food for his children. That night he imagines this in a dream sequence where he’s a puppeteer for the skeletons (calaveras) of the Day of the Dead. His wife steals one of the many turkeys from the rich household for which she does the washing and roasts it for her husband, who goes to the woods to eat it in peace. There he meets the Devil, God and Death. What follows is depicted realistically, Macario becomes friends with Death who gives him a miracle water that cures those who are about to die. He gains a fortune while remaining a good man, until the Catholic inquisition accuses him of sorcery and sentences him to be burnt at the stake. In another fantasy sequence Macario visits the field of candles that represent each human life and sees his own getting snuffed out. Watch the trailer.
In the theater lobby an altar (ofrenda) with marigolds was set up, I wrote the name of a dearly departed friend.