Diego Sheinbaum

La Santa (Saint) of Orson Welles: Conversations between Mexican Melodrama and the Parodic Reflexive Tradition

The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico

In the film versions of the novel Santa (1903), Vázquez Mantencón (2005) sees “the gateway to the kitchen of the Mexican Film Industry of the first half of the 20th century.” No wonder, Santa of 1918 was one of the few successes of Mexican silent fiction cinema and Santa of 1931 was the first sound film. The three versions that followed (Norman Foster and Alfredo Gómez de la Vega 1943, Fernando de Fuentes 1949, Gómez Muriel 1968) helped consolidate a type of Mexican melodrama that places in the centre a sinful and virgin woman, bad and good at the same time. This archetype would be divided and combined in different ways in the following decades, even forming the subgenre of cabaret films. Within this context I am interested in the intervention of Orson Welles. His screenplay Santa (November 1940) arose from a passionate encounter with the first Latin actress to achieve success in Hollywood, the Mexican Dolores del Río. The director Chano Urueta was the one who proposed to the actress to make a new adaptation. He wrote a script (alternative to Welles’) that the actress never accepted. Possibly that’s why the film never was made. Welles’ screenplay was found by David Ramón (1991) among Dolores del Río’s papers, along with Chano Urueta’s letters that give an account of the process. The conversations even refer to photographer Gregg Toland’s notes on the project. To these conversations we must add the voice of Norman Foster, who was a colleague of Welles and would end up filming the 1943 version, where is clear the influence of the libretto of the director of Citizen Kane. How did del Río and Welles construct their version. How does Welles’ passion for the voice – as a radio artist – emerge in this screenplay? And what does it tell us about the way he was experimenting with labyrinthine narrative constructions, flashbacks and silenced voices appearing in stream of consciousness?

Diego Sheinbaum (Mexico City, 1974) Doctor in Comparative Literature and researcher at the Poetic Center of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). His lines of research are: 1) The reflexive, parodic and carnivalesque tradition in Literature and Cinema; 2) Poetics and Rhetoric of the Screenplay in Mexico. He has been a screenwriter for National Geographic, Discovery Channel and Maroma Producciones. His most recent articles are “Reflections on Cinematographic Writing in Mexico (1965-2013)”, “The Poetics of Aristotle among Hollywood Screenwriters” and in 2024 he and Maricruz Castro Ricalde publish the book Behind the Shadows: Women Screenwriters at the Turn of the Century in Mexico.