The cinema of Lilia Prado
Mexican cinema not only immortalized its noble and tragic heroines, but, in its clamor of images and narratives, it also produced exuberant, sensual and voluptuous women—personalities like María Félix, Katy Jurado, Leticia Palma, or Ninón Sevilla promptly took over the screen.
But without doubt, one of the actresses who decisivelytransformed the course of our cinema with her singular erotic and dramatic charge was the riveting Lilia Prado.
This compact beauty showed off the contours of her divine legs and exquisite body in tailored sweaters and fitted skirts. Thanks to her perfect combination of ingenuity and sensuality —which she managed to imprint into every character she played from the beginning of her career in the 1940’s through the end— she became something of a Mexican Lolita. Lilia Prado’s legend begins when in 1946, at the young age of 17, she wins the beauty pageant: “The most beautiful legs.” The small triumph allows her to debut next to Pedro Infante in La barca de oro (1947).
With her adorable round-face, gorgeous eyes, full and sexy lips, Lilia Prado stood her own next to her masculine counterparts: Pedro Infante, Antonio Badú, Germán Valdés Tin Tan, Adalberto Martínez Resortes, Luis Aguilar or Arturo de Córdova. She began her career participating in Tarzan and the Mermaids featuring the great Johnny Weissmuller and had her first memorable performances in the cabaret Smyrna in Confidencias de un ruletero (Alejandro Galindo, 1949). In 1950 she shone in El gavilán pollero with Infante and Badú. The film was directed by the first-timer Rogelio A. González, screenwriter of Ismael Rodríguez, who would later cast her in Las mujeres de mi general —an entertaining historical piece set during Mexican Revolution, with plenty of macho humor and Infante songs. Infante plays a man torn between the feisty soldadera (Lilia Prado) and a seductive vamp (Chula Prieto).
In 1951, Luis Buñuel cast her in Subida al cielo, an unconventional remake of the story of Adam and Eve in Paradise. This superbly erotic story included unforgettable moments such as thdreamlike scene at the apple tree, and the sight of Lilia Prado stepping out of a bus and showing off her beautiful legs.
Something similar happens in La illusión viaja en tranvía, a story where the ordinary is suddenly rendered strange.
In the 1952 Rumba caliente she plays a cigarette vendor alongside “Resortes”, In Cuarto de hotel, Lilia becomes the most conspicuous sexual object of Mexican cinema, in the role of an innocent small-town girl who arrives at the capital with her husband Roberto Cañedo and is subsequently confined to a room where she is subjected to unspeakable abuses and several attempts of rape. In Talpa, an adaptation of a short story by Juan Rulfo, she is the source of a dispute between two brothers. In 1957 she is joined by Germán Valdés Tin Tan in the comedy El que con niños se acuesta. With A media luz los tres she shows her characteristic elegance and a serene beauty next to Arturo de Córdova. A year later, she stars in Kermesse: a Mexican version of Picnic (1955) with William Holden and Kim Novak. In Pueblito (Emilio Fernández, 1961) she plays the young wife of a stubborn, aging landowner and pig breeder breeder (Fernando Soler) who opposes the construction of a rural school. Then, she moves on to the sexy dark comedy Los cuervos están de luto (Francisco del Villar, 1965). Besides participating in films like El medio pelo, the short film El náufrago de la calle Providencia, La India, the episode Esperanza from Fe, esperanza y caridad and El rincón de las vírgenes, during the 1970s, Lilia obtains the Silver Goddess Award (Diosa de Plata). Next to her Golden Ariel, obtained in 1999, this award attests to the successful career of one of the most beautiful, charismatic and alluring women in Mexican cinema.
RAFAEL AVIÑA
Screenwriter, film critic and scholar
Lilia Prado: A Sex Symbol of Mexican Cinema
Well-loved Lilia Prado (Huetamo, Michoacán, 1929 - Mexico City, 2006) was always known as “Lilia Prado from Michoacán”; this is to say that this intriguing woman was never at odds with her roots in the mind of the Mexican public –Michoacán’s landscape is as beautiful as its women. Lilia Prado –a short creature with perfect anatomy, gorgeous breasts, beautiful egs, and, above all, prodigious hips– was a renowned film star who possessed a mesmerizing sex appeal. She began her career in 1947, and her filmography consists of 97 seven films shot over the course of several decades. The camera, always operated by our finest cameramen, invariably captured her image with delight. Paraphrasing the famous Mexican woman poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, we can say that the camera “stroked her with its eyes”, and, vicariously, through the lens of that camera, thousands of Mexicans caressed her as well withburning desire. The filmic shots of versatile actress Lilia Prado are a myth in our cinematic culture, so much so that they reached the field of literature, where Efraín Huerta, inflamed by Prado’s beauty, wrote several poems praising the actress’s hips. Furthermore, due to his chaste (and therefore perverse) eroticism, Luis Buñuel left a vivid and fundamental filmic impression of Lilia Prado’s voluptuosity in Subida al cielo (1951) and La ilusión viaja en tranvía (1953). In these films, the camera virtually strokes her, which is precisely what audiences do whenever they lay eyes on her. In Mexican cinema, Lilia Prado is an innocent girl who candidly exposes her blossoming nature. “In Europe they used to call me The Innocent Perverse” Lilia told me once. I replied, “It’s the audience who is perverse, but you do incite them, albeit innocently.”
DAVID RAMON
