From Märchenland to Mexico: Macario’s International Fairy-Tale Journey

In the spring of 1959, the Oscar-winning American special-effects maestro John Fulton visited Mexico at the invitation of the Production Council of Clasa Films Mundiales. The purpose of his trip was to advise on effects work for the studio’s upcoming film, Macario (Roberto Gavaldón, 1960): a folkloric parable about a penniless Mexican woodcutter and his respective encounters with Satan, God, and Death. After reading the script, Fulton was, Variety’s Mexico City correspondent reported, “highly enthusiastic and said [the] picture should be made in English and Spanish because it has world-wide appeal.”¹ Fulton’s professed intention of trying to convince Paramount Pictures to fund an English-language version came to nought. Nevertheless, at a time when the Mexican film industry was increasingly eyeing American co-financing and global markets, Macario would come to occupy a prominent place within the rapidly unfolding dialogues about cultural and commercial aspects of Mexican cinema, both at home and upon the international stage.

Drawing upon source material of intercontinental origins, Macario’s makers imported its fairy-tale plot from Europe before Mexicanizing it and then re-exporting it to global audiences. Offering a sophisticated blend of international folkloric motifs, Mexican cultural identity, and strains of the magical realism that had recently begun to make a mark upon the nation’s literature, the film was expressly calculated to appeal to audiences both at home and abroad. It proved a winning formula. In Mexico, Macario was the highest domestic performer in the 1960 box office chart, with its gross of $156,681 considered “spectacular coin”.² Meanwhile, its international reception was nothing short of a triumph. Screening at numerous festivals, its high-profile entry into 1960’s official competition at Cannes was followed by a nomination in the Best Foreign Language category at the 1961 Academy Awards. It was the first Mexican film to garner this honour (albeit not the award itself, which would go to Ingmar Bergman’s Jungfrukällan [The Virgin Spring, 1960]).

Death and the Doctor: Macario’s European Roots

The explicit literary base for Macario is a novelette by B. Traven, which, although reportedly written in English, was first published in German as a limited-edition loyalty bonus for members of a Swiss book club, the Büchergilde Gutenberg, in 1950. It would achieve a higher profile after its first English-language appearance, now retitled “The Third Guest”, in the March–April 1953 issue of the American pulp magazine-turned-digest, Fantastic, and its subsequent reprint in The Best American Short Stories 1954.³ Neither the author nor the folkloric material from which he drew inspiration were American, however.

Traven’s story, as has been widely noted, takes many narrative incidents and themes from a fairy tale entitled “Der Gevatter Tod” (“Godfather Death”), collected by the Brothers Grimm from a story told by Marie Elizabeth Wild and first published in 1812.⁴ It tells of a peasant who chooses Death over God to be godfather to his 13th child, of how Death later bestowed healing powers upon the boy, and what ensued from the doctor’s injudicious presumptuousness in attempting to disrupt the schedule of Death’s harvest. Yet, this was not the only folkloric source that Traven tapped. The incident that propels the plot – Macario’s willingness to trade his soul for a private turkey feast – appears nowhere in Grimm but parallels, instead, the protagonist’s craving for a whole hare in the Spanish fairy tale, “Juan Holgado y la muerte” (“Juan Holgado and Death”).⁵ Here, too, the eponymous peasant agrees to share his meal with Death and is, like Macario, rewarded with the magical means to achieve fame and fortune as a doctor. Numerous other European variants abound, which may or may not have served as further reference points for Traven.⁶

With Macario, Traven did more than simply transplant narrative components from a pan-European fairy-tale subgroup to 18th-century Mexico, however. Profoundly shaped by his own experiences and beliefs, his adaptation intensified the themes of class oppression that characterise so many of the fairy tales emanating from the collective voice of the common people. 

One of the literary world’s most notoriously elusive figures, B. Traven’s true identity has fascinated and flummoxed critics and biographers since the early days of his writing career, which began shortly after his emigration from Europe to Mexico in 1924. Yet, while his birth name and parentage remain opaque, some consensus has been reached on a few biographical facts. One is that he had lived in Germany during his youth, where, under the name of Ret Marut, he had an undistinguished stint as a stage actor and where he was founder-editor of the anarchist magazine, Der Ziegelbrenner (1917–1921).⁷ Another is that he spent much of his first decade in Mexico living among the Indigenous population of the southern state of Chiapas. It was here, writes Sheilah Wilson, “that Traven became committed to the idea that the economic exploitation of the Indian was a more devastating and humiliating oppressor than the harsh jungle lands.”⁸ 

This theme is writ as large in Macario as it is in Traven’s celebrated series of Jungle Novels (1930–1939).⁹ In refusing to share his meal with either Satan, who appears to him in the form of a wealthy charro, or with God, who represents the insatiable greed of the Catholic Church, Macario rejects the demands of those who already possess far more than he yet still desire to take from him what little he has.¹⁰ With Death, whose humble attire enswathes “the hungriest face he had ever believed possible,” Macario feels a sense of familiarity and comradeship.¹¹ European folkloric traditions provided Traven with the perfect vehicle to pursue his longstanding agenda of foregrounding the role of economic exploitation in exacerbating poverty and social injustice while forging a connection between the situation of the contemporary Mexican rural peasantry and wider suffering across the ages and around the globe.

Traven’s political perspective resonated with leading members of the film’s production crew, including director Roberto Gavaldón, screenwriter Emilio Carballido, and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, while also chiming with the more widespread (albeit disjointed) left-leaning people’s movements of the years following the Mexican Revolution.¹² Indeed, Macario’s theme of class oppression, which the filmmakers strengthened further in their screen adaptation, would see the film selected, in 1962, as one of eight Mexican productions appropriate for export to the Soviet Union.¹³ There, fairy tales had, in the wake of Maxim Gorky’s influential keynote speech at the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress, been widely adopted across multiple media as politically approved vehicles through which to articulate and promote socialist ideals.¹⁴

From Page to Screen: From “Godfather Death” to Día de Muertos

Gavaldón and Carballido’s screen adaptation is, in many respects, faithful to Traven’s book, in terms of its story, characters, and the spare simplicity of its narrational tone. The excisions are minor. More significant are Gavaldón and Carballido’s additions. Macario had been, from first inception, calculated to make an impact on American and European markets: an ambition that led to some controversy and dissent within the Mexican critical establishment.¹⁵ It was from this ambition that the most consequential alterations arose.

The most significant change was the incorporation of an element entirely absent from Traven’s tale and the fairy stories upon which he had drawn: namely, its setting during the celebrations for the Day of the Dead. The degree to which Macario is designed to trumpet and interpret Mexican cultural identity for international audiences is evident from the film’s very first moments. A series of expository titles explains the historical origins and contemporary customs of these national festivities, striking images of which supply the backdrop to the opening credits, and within which the events that launch the narrative are deep-seated. Although Macario was far from the first Mexican film to feature the Day of the Dead, none of its predecessors had done so with such vividness or vigour, nor would they prove so influential in shaping its image within the international imagination.

This narrative thread, which emphasises that even in death the rich are fed better than the poor, caustically amplifies the rhetoric of class consciousness that runs throughout the film. It also motivates the sole sequence of complex effects, in which Macario (Ignacio López Tarso) dreams of skeletons engaged in a gluttonous but unequally apportioned feast. It is this reverie that heightens his wish for a turkey to the point of obsession (a desire Traven had economically imparted in the opening line of his tale). Moreover, new scenes during which Macario interacts with the townsfolk as they prepare for the celebrations introduce an exchange between Macario and a candle-maker in which the artisan reprises Death’s speech to Juan Holgado in the final line of that tale. “We are all born to die,” he admonishes him. This sentiment, of which the iconography of death is a constant reminder, lends philosophical weight to the decisions Macario makes through the course of the narrative, as well as foreshadowing another departure from Traven’s novelette at the end of the film. Here, the screenwriters returned to Grimm, reinstating and extending the finale of “Godfather Death” in what has become Macario’s most celebrated scene.

In this stunning sequence, Death takes Macario to his cave, where he shows him a dazzling vista of thousands of candles that represent as many human lives and which will all burn out at their appointed hour. Its mise-en-scène suggests the influence of European art cinema as much as it does Gavaldón and Carballido’s close engagement with European folklore. As many Mexican critics disparagingly observed, Fritz Lang had included a similar scene in Der müde Tod (Destiny, 1921) – although it seems hard to dispute that Gavaldón and Figueroa’s staging is more visually arresting and possessed of greater affective power.¹⁶ Such was the scope of the spectacle, Figueroa recalled, that when the scene was shot in Mexico’s famous Cacahuamilpa cave system even the tourists were roped into the daunting task of hand-lighting the 3,000 candles.¹⁷ Whether the representation of death personified in Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman, 1957) wielded any influence on Macario, as some contemporary critics proposed, seems less easily proven; tonal, visual, and even socio-economic differences between their two Deaths are strongly marked.¹⁸

Macario’s Afterlife

The unease some Mexican critics voiced over Macario’s alignment with international art-house conventions, and the perceived privileging of the festival circuit over the domestic market, intersected with wider debates about the future of Mexican cinema during a time of crisis. Indeed, Macario has received retrospective acclaim as the last hurrah of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. Yet, as its box office success attests, the film resonated as much with the Mexican people as it did with the global cinematic cognoscenti. The filmmakers’ skilful synthesis of transnational folk-cultural components conjured a fantasy that invited interpretation as, on the one hand, a universal allegory and, on the other, an expression of intrinsically Mexican ethnography. 

Outliving its makers and its critics alike, the fable of Macario continues to prosper. In Mexico, where the story was swiftly assimilated into oral folklore, it has become, for many, an annual viewing tradition at the time of Día de Muertos.¹⁹ In 2013, the film was adapted into a Spanish-language musical stage show by the California-based Chicano theatre company Teatro Visión: a production still performed regularly at this time of year.²⁰ Then, in 2021, the Spanish-American-Mexican production house El Estudio announced plans for a new film version to be scripted by Gonzalo Maza, with director Gerardo Naranjo added to the project in 2024.²¹ Meanwhile, Macario has exerted its influence on a range of international film productions – most notably, perhaps, the immensely successful family animation, The Book of Life (Jorge R. Gutiérrez, 2014), as its director has openly acknowledged.²² Now, in the wake of the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project’s 4K digital restoration in 2023, Gavaldón’s cinematic classic has re-entered the international festival and art-house circuit, bringing this timeless fable to a new generation of audiences. 

Macario (1960 Mexico 91 mins)

Prod Co: Clasa Films Mundiales, Estudios Churubusco Prod: Armando Orive Alba Dir: Roberto Gavaldón Scr: Emilio Carballido, Roberto Gavaldón Phot: Gabriel Figueroa Mus: Raúl Lavista Ed: Gloria Schoemann Art Dir: Manuel Fontanals

Cast: Ignacio López Tarso, Pina Pellicer, Enrique Lucero, Mario Alberto Rodríguez, José Gálvez, José Luis Jiménez, Eduardo Fajardo, Consuelo Frank, José Dupeyrón, Celia Tejeda, Pepé y sus Marionetas

Endnotes