The Dove (1927)

Another film that demonstrates the ambiguity of the American response to Mexican protest was The Dove, released by Norma Talmadge Productions and distributed by United Artists in December of 1927. Set in the fictional Latin American nation of “Costa Roja,” The Dove was produced by Joseph Schenck, directed by Roland West, and starred Norma Talmadge in one of her last screen roles. The film was billed as a romantic melodrama and was based on a 1925 play by Willard Mack, which was in turn based on a short story called “The Blue Ribbon” by Gerald Beaumont, published in Red Book Magazine in 1923. Like The Bad Man, the Norma Talmadge silent was remade by RKO Radio Pictures in sound in 1931 as The Girl of the Rio, starring Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio, and again by RKO in 1939 as The Girl and the Gambler, starring the Hungarian-born actress Steffi Duna. While this transnational lineage of the character of Dolores ‘the Dove’ (later renamed Dolores ‘the Dove’ Romero in the 1939 version) is interesting, the Norma Talmadge version of the film was deeply engaged in Mexican protests over the representation of Mexicans in Hollywood movies. Indeed, it was for a time at the very center of the protests. Though films of the 1920s such as The Bad Man and The Dove continued to present derogatory stereotypes of Mexican villains, they each demonstrated the ploys that Hollywood used to soften their message. The growth of Mexico and Latin America as a viable market for films was a concern for both Hollywood and Washington. As Ulf Jonas Bjork has written, the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce (BFDC)—the agency in charge of trade promotion in the U.S. Department of Commerce—had established strong ties with Hollywood dating back to 1921. Bureau employee Clarence Jackson North was the point man in Washington for establishing the strong relationship with the film industry. His comment that “through American motion pictures, the ideals, culture, custom, and traditions of the United States are gradually” resulting in a “subtle Americanization process” in other countries mirrored Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover’s 1927 claim that American films were central in “transmitting ‘intellectual ideas and national ideals’ from the United States to other nations.” North’s primary contact in Hollywood was Frederick Herron, who worked for William Hays, the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA).Hays, who had famously held that foreign trade “followed the film, not the flag,” was equally eager to assist the BFDC and profit from the extensive material and intellectual support that Hoover offered Hollywood in the realm of foreign trade and distribution. The Dove’s release in 1927 came during the same year that relations between the BFDC and MPPDA were at their closest, when North’s office began sending the Hollywood trade press weekly press releases and updates from his Commerce Reports, which had begun publishing film items and reports two years earlier. The Dove’s use of the fictional “Costa Roja” as a setting has been seen by historians as one of the most novel ploys by Hollywood to give attention to the expanding Latin American market, while leaving their biased narratives and imagery about Mexicans and Latin Americans largely unaltered. It was also viewed as a transparent at the time. In a January 3, 1928 review, the New York Times wrote that “geography” was meaningless to this “yarn,” noting that the producers “decided to pluck Mexicana from Mr. Mack’s original effort, call it Costa Roja and then fling it over to the blue Mediterranean.” The Times then explicitly connects The Dove to the Mexican protest, commenting that the lead male character Don Jose Maria y Sandoval, played by Noah Beery (modeled on the theatrical role played by “The Bad Man” star Holbrook Blinn), was “a screen character to which the Mexican Government may have objected to, for he is greedy, sensuous, boastful, cold-blooded, irritable, and quite a wine-bibber.” The review continues, however, by suggesting that Don Jose may not offend Mexican officials because, after all, “he does dress well . . . hates to have his luncheon spoiled by a noisy victim of his shooting squad [and] adores beauty.” Mexican politicians were not fooled by these (ostensibly) positive traits presented in the film and The Dove was the first high-profile attempt at economic boycott. As Wilbur Morse wrote in 1931, after years of “having its diplomatic representations so disregarded, Mexico took its first step toward definite action about two years ago when it barred Norma Talmadge’s silent version of The Dove. Soon, every film in which the villain said ‘carramba’ or was known as ‘Pancho’ or ‘Lopez’ was refused showing in any Mexican theater.” It is quite appropriate that Morse’s examples of derogatory Mexican names were the exact full name of Holbrook Blinn’s character in the Bad Man, for Mordaunt Hall, writing a second article about the film in the New York Times, declared that “this film should have been called ‘The Bad Man’s Brother’ instead of The Dove.”The Dove featured cinematic similarities to the Bad Man as well, including the same exaggerated Mexican accents used in the inter-titles of the 1923 film Not only does Don Jose speak in broken Spanish/English, proclaiming himself as the “Bes’ dam caballero in Costa Roja,” and commenting “Dios, what a man I am!,” but so too does the Dolores “the Dove” speak in a manner that even contemporary reviewers related to an attempt at a more subtle form of derision. “As you watch the scenes flash by,” Hall wrote, “it seems rather strange to perceive through the subtitles that Dolores talks in broken English when conversing with Don Jose, a fellow countryman. This is obviously done to give her the chance to use the expression, ‘You betcha my life!’ quite a number of times.”