Saturday, January 18, 2014

I Find My Father in a Scene From a 1957 Mexican Movie as a Waiter Falls into a Swimming Pool

A few years ago I had the thousands of my family's slides scanned. There were family vacations, and also a number of slides of visits my father made to Mexico in the 1950s, before he was married (he died in 1994). 

This was one of the more interesting ones:


This is clearly a photograph of a movie being made at a hotel, and my father managed to capture the exact moment when an actor playing a waiter is falling into the swimming pool:



My brother Matt had the photo up a Flickr page, and a couple of years ago received a message from a Michel:


It is a filming of the Mexican movie "El bolero de Raquel" where there appears recognized actor Mario Moreno "Cantinflas" ... That's a nice memories of that beautiful Acapulco, very different from that of today.

My father also took a photo of Cantinflas:


"El bolero de Raquel" was released in 1957 and can be found on YouTube. Here is the scene that includes the waiter's fall into the pool (1:43 into this video):


Michel identified the location as Hotel Caleta in Acapulco. The hotel and pool are still there:

If you look at my father's photo, you can see a diving board in the foreground, which means my father was either by or on the diving board.

Watching the scene from the movie, the diving board is in the background:


It's very low resolution, but there is someone on that diving board, and from his reverse angle photograph, that must be my father.

Update: I bought a DVD of the movie, and with its higher resolution discovered that he was in three separate shots in the one minute scene at the pool. See new blog post. 

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