La viudita naviera (Luis Marquina, 1961)Paquita Rico entre el carnaval de Cádiz y la rumba habanera

Abstract

At the dawn of the 1960s, Spanish commercial cinema was preparing for important changes. Despite the increasing depletion of the folkloric musical, this genre continued to exploit the charisma of high-profile singers. This is the case of La viudita naviera (Luis Marquina, 1961), with music by Daniel Montorio, both veteran professionals: a film tailored to the singer Paquita Rico, an adaptation of a Cadiz farce by José María Pemán released in September 1960, with “musical notes” by Daniel Montorio. The play had been a great success and the filming was widely covered by the media, due to the popularity of the female singer. In this article we will reconstruct the details of the film adaptation and analyzethe semantic load of Montorio’s incidental music and diegetic numbers (tanguillos, habaneras, flamenco dance and Caribean rumba) that do not interrupt the action. The feminization of the territory (Cuba as opposed to Andalusia), the bet on musical crossbreeding (and, at the same time, Caribbean an Andalusian clichés), the satirical-burlesque potential of some carnival comparsas that comment on the action, the integration of dramatic scoring with diegetic numbers (sharing musical materials) and the exploitation of the nuances of the personality of the protagonist through the habaneraand the tanguilloare some of the most outstanding features of this film in which music is an essential tool for the cultural dialogue between Spain and Latin America.