Salón México + Midnight Boogaloo Live!

To celebrate our Mexico Noir series, curated by best-selling Mexican Gothic novelist Silvia Moreno Garcia, we invited Midnight Boogaloo to take the stage and get the party going. After the music, enjoy the seminal dancehall melodrama Salón México, a key film from the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema.

Midnight Boogaloo is a collective of musicians coming from all around the Milky Way. This project was founded by Alan Ruiz with the intention of bringing latin “descargas” back to the streets. Influenced by the New York sound of the 60s and 70s, this project emerges from the rich and diverse Vancouver music scene. The band is a high energy act that will move you physically and emotionally. The repertoire is a mix of original and traditional music from Latin America including styles like Cumbia, Salsa and Boogaloo, with a Rock & Roll aesthetic.

Alan Ruiz on Guitar, Daniel Ruiz on drums, Linaldo Sans on Bass and Robin Layne on congas

About the film: Salón México (Emilio Fernandez, 1949, 95 min)

Salón México is one of the landmark films of period, and one of the most fascinating. Dance halls and bordellos sprang up across Mexico in the 1940s as the country became more affluent and attracted more foreign visitors. Mercedes (Marga López) is a prostitute who works at the titular bar. She uses her earnings to send her younger sister to a private school in the hope she will have a brighter future.

Cheated by her pimp (Rodolfo Acosta) she recklessly steals his wallet and is only saved from a severe beating by the intervention of a kindly policeman, Lupe (Miguel Inclán, cast against type in a rare sympathetic role). The film’s melodramatic plot mixes hard-hitting social realism with romanticism and swells of patriotic fervour, along with multiple red hot dance sequences.

Its success helped spark a wave of películas de cabareteras (dancehall pictures) with similar elements, Victims of Sin among them.

Televisa Univision All Rights Reserved. We appreciate the support of Fundación Televisa // DCP Courtesy of Cineteca Nacional México

In an addition to dishing out stabbings, shootouts and seasonal fiestas, Fernández synthesizes a host of cultural references. Frenzied Afro-Cuban dancing mixes with statelier Mexican danzón; one set piece is illuminated by a flashing neon sign, and another puts Mercedes and her sister in a museum, surrounded by pre-Columbian artifacts. The owner of the cabaret tells patrons that the composer Aaron Copland got the inspiration for his “Salón México” suite while sitting at their very table.

J Hoberman, New York Times

A brilliant early example of the cabaretera (cabaret) genre… Energetic and low-down, this is essentially a film noir version of Stella Dallas, with the added delight of musical numbers that take place in the nightclub of the title. The dancing is explosively sexy, full of gyrating pelvises that would have given the Hollywood censors a stroke.

Farran Smith Nehme, Village Voice

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