Diagonaldi Very well executed

SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Greenes Please don't spend money on this.

MonsterPerfect Good idea lost in the noise

Terrell-4 Elena Tejero (Ninon Sevilla) is a peppy young girl from a well-to-do family in Chihuahua, the kind who skips across the dining room to plant a happy kiss on her loving father's indulgent cheek. When her mother leaves home for another man and her father kills himself, a sad Elena decides to go to Juarez and find a new life as a secretary. It's not long before she learns men want more than dictation. Thanks to Pretty Boy Lucio, a pimp and gangster, the innocent Elena winds up drunk, drugged and assaulted in the brothel/cabaret owned by a woman known as Rosaura. This cruel queenpin of crime oscillates between Mother Gin Sling and, later, Joan Crawford on a fraught day. Elena's future is simple, Rosaura tells her. She'll entertain the customers on the nightclub floor and then entertain them again upstairs...or she'll feel the lame, mute Rengo's knife slice across her cheek. Elena does what she must, gains popularity as a dancer, never meets a man worth more than a used piece of wet chewing gum and gets out as soon as she can. It's not long before Elena is a smash as a dancer and singer in Mexico City. She becomes engaged to a young lawyer of impeccable family...but there is a twist to the story about to happen that will shock and daze us. Elena by now has turned into a hard young woman who is determined to wreak vengeance on those who have ruined her life. She may be an ultimate victim but she's going to see that those who wronged her get theirs. Her curdled milk of human kindness would choke Mother Teresa. The twist, when it comes, is going to give Elena a lot of gimlet pleasure. Aventurera is Elena's story. Hold on to your hats, your wallets and keep your zippers zipped. We're talking corruption and revenge; songs and production numbers; diaphanous costumes and pineapple hats, melodrama and death; sex and sin...lot's of sin. The movie is a type of Mexican film called a cabaretera, a cabaret/crime/melodrama movie that was hugely popular in post-WWII Mexico. The girls are fallen doves. The cabarets and nightclubs are just a step above brothels. The owners, hustlers and crooks are cruel and corrupt. The customers are hypocrites. And the songs are great. Ninon Sevilla may not have been a great actress but she had energy to burn. When she's strutting, stomping and shaking across the stage you'd swear she was channeling Rita Hayworth and Carmen Miranda. As a dancer, her hips do most of the work. They must have been double jointed. There are five songs and three full-blown dancing-singing productions. They're great fun. Her Chiquita Banana number is impressive... "Chiquita Banana, girl of Martinique, dresses in banana leaves.She doesn't wear dresses, she doesn't wear pants.Winter, summer, she doesn't care. It's no difference what she wears, And she rightly says she's ready if someone wins her heart." Aventurera, for all the shameless melodrama, is also something of a statement about feminism. Elena might become a bitter, unforgiving heroine, but there's not a man in sight worth worrying about. They're all just macho weaklings, selfish drunks, groping bosses sleazy crooks and horny adolescents. I could see Aventurera as an unusual American B- movie produced by Betty Friedan, Busby Berkeley and Edgar Ulmer. With all the songs, dances, theatrics and...well, stuff, is Aventurera as campy as some say? Probably, I suppose, but no more than those Bollywood extravaganzas of passion, tears, dances and flashy costumes. It's most likely a movie you'll enjoy even if you say to yourself, "What next could possibly happen?" Just remember what that smooth singer early in the movie crooned to us with a Latin beat... "Sell your love dearly, Aventurera./ May it pay the great cost of your painful past. And he who awaits the sweet honey of your kiss / Must pay the price in diamonds for your sin. Make him pay in diamonds for your sin."

tedg This is a gas.Its Mexican, and in the Spanish tradition that everything goes: all sorts of narrative devices and all sorts of plot types are sliced and diced and served in a sort of salsa that makes sense.Its old fashioned floor show musical, but sexier. Its old fashioned noir, but with more unlikely circumstance than usual. Its soap opera with more overt mugging than on daytime TeeVee. Its justice, and romance and white slavery. And it works, which is the miracle that is the most attractive.The noir elements are in the simple plot: girl on the street gets sold into slavery to a woman whose rich son she subsequently marries out of spite — and then falls in love with him. Emotional blackmail of the deepest, blackest kind as turnabout for sexual villainy of the blackest kind.The strange thing is that they clearly designed the thing so that the musical numbers are the most attractive. Our innocent daughter is in her enforced sex slave mode when we first see them and we are supposed to ogle the same as the smarmy men who gather around and reach for her. Later, even after she does not have to, she reverts to this, the implication being that the sexual beast has been irreversibly unleashed.But that's just what attracted the millionaire son, right? That raw, innocent sex? And that's what is supposed to attract us.I guess its okay, if you are a Mexican audience, because she's Cuban, and therefore relatively wild in that way.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

andrabem "Aventurera" is a very good melodrama - meaning a drama spiced with musical numbers. But the drama turned, with the passing of time, into comedy. Well, anyway by seeing the picture I had the feeling that the actors were not really taking their part so seriously; what I mean is that it felt like they were having fun - the melodrama with its conventions, its stock characters and innumerable twists, had no surprises in store for them. "Aventurera" has so many and such fantastic twists, right from the beginning, that is absolutely hilarious. The plot, as such, borders on the incredible, the coincidences abound - one is almost reminded of Buñuel. The objective of the film is naturally to entertain and for doing it, everything is allowed. The only thing demanded of the public was a complete suspension of disbelief and they were only too happy to comply.The stereotyped roles presented by "Aventurera" demanded a stylized interpretation, so the film is a melodrama with a light touch - it tells a tragic story sprinkled with musical numbers. It entertains and thrills; the acting is not hysterical, on the contrary one could say that it's almost good-humored. Is this a contradiction? No, it isn't. The film woks well - it just tells a sad story with a smile on the eyes. And here enters the heroine.Niñon Sevilla is wonderful - I'm not speaking of her acting qualities, because good acting was not demanded for her character and would only spoil the film. Niñon Sevilla is beautiful and full of charisma and charm. Her presence fills the screen. She's a naive, naughty and sensual woman - she really shines! One can say that the film is carried by her. But it would be unjust not to mention other actors such as Tito Junco (El Guapo), Andrea Palma (Rosaura) and Miguel Inclan (Ringo). One can detect a feeling of camaraderie among the actors throughout the film.There's a musical number where Niñon Sevilla, dressed as Carmen Miranda, sings "Chiquita Bacana" in Portuguese! "Aventurera" is a really good film - it's a melodrama like no other. You'll laugh your belly out and Niñon Sevilla will charm your weary eyes.

fordraff Take a Lana Turner impersonator, a melodramatic plot from a Douglas Sirk film, stir with Busby Berkeley dance routines and more than a little film noir shadows and fog, and you will have "Aventurera," a camp classic that provides 101 minutes of entertainment with a lot of fun and laughs.It has a plot that goes on and on, the sort of story that would have been packed between the lurid covers of a '50's paperback. "The mother of the man she loved was the madam who'd turned her into a harlot," the banner across the cover would have read. And, indeed, this is the core situation of the plot, which has a strong narrative thrust. Had it been a novel, this would have been a page-turner, an all-night read.Director Alberto Gout and screenwriters Alvaro Custodio and Carlos Sampelayo must have watched a great many American films during the 40s and then simply stitched together a film taking a little bit from this film and a little bit from another.The robbery sequence, definitely like an American film noir, distinctly recalled "Crisscross" with Burt Lancaster. But other scenes had a definite noir look as well. The nightclub in Rosaura's brothel and her office, with its window that looked down on the customers seemed taken directly from "Gilda." Fog-shrouded streets resembled those of any number of noirs I've seen (foggy finale of "The Big Combo").The dance numbers, all of which were superfluous to the plot, were influenced by 20th Century Fox musicals that featured Betty Grable and Carmen Miranda.Had this been an American film, it would not have pleased the Hays Office for it is explicit in making clear that Elena becomes a prostitute. It's never obscene or vulgar; there are no nude scenes. Elena's rape is never shown, and when she appears the following morning to confront the madam, Rosaura, demanding to be let out of the brothel, all of her makeup is in place. Yet the scenes of the brothel show men and women, often obviously drunk, their arms about each other, pairing off and traipsing up the stairs to bedrooms from the nightclub. In one upstairs room, we see several couples sitting on couches kissing. The Hays Office would have demanded that such scenes be deleted.Another thing that interested me about this film: all of the lead actors look very American. Ninon Sevilla, who plays Elena, obviously a graduate of the Lana Turner School of Dramatic Arts, acts with the Turner flashing eyes and flaring nostrils. Andrea Palma, the madam, reminded me of Corale Browne with a touch of Gloria Swanson thrown in. Ruben Rojo, who played Mario, was very handsome in an American leading man way (think Zachary Scott). However, the "bad guys" looked stereotypically Mexican. It seemed to me that the filmmakers were using actors that would make this film acceptable to Americans, though I don't know if the film received an American release back in 1949.Don't take it seriously. Just enjoy!