Restored Cavalcanti for Free Worldwide

Born in Rio de Janeiro, Cavalcanti studied architecture in Geneva, worked as a set designer for Marcel L’Herbier (L’inhumaine) in Paris, and then with John Grierson and the GPO Film Unit in London. In 2010, Kevin Jackson wrote in the Guardian that Cavalcanti directed “a handful of the most polished, imaginative, and downright enjoyable films of the 1940s. His accomplishments include Went the Day Well?, an extraordinary combination of war film and thriller; Champagne Charlie, an exuberant musical comedy; They Made Me a Fugitive, a taut and grimy thriller that rivals the best contemporary gangster films; and Nicholas Nickleby, a fine Dickens adaptation. He was also the cocreator of the supernatural portmanteau film Dead of Night, to which he contributed the much-imitated yarn about the tormented ventriloquist (Michael Redgrave) and his demonic doll. Martin Scorsese, no less, recently nominated Dead of Night as one of his top ten scary films.”

In 1950, Cavalcanti returned to Brazil when industrialist Francisco Matarazzo asked him to run a new venture, Companhia Cinematográfica Vera Cruz. Teeming with European technical know-how, the studio nevertheless ran aground just four years later. As Furtado points out, Cinema Nova filmmakers such as Glauber Rocha considered Vera Cruz to be a prime example of just how out of touch the Brazilian film industry had become with its audiences.

“Like Max Ophuls,” writes Furtado, Cavalcanti is “a nomadic filmmaker whose work belongs to the world more than any national cinema, but those most naturally interested in his work, Brazilians, often reject the films he made in the country. Yet Cavalcanti’s three Brazilian films are far more interesting than the myth of a great misadventure that has formed around his unhappy return to the country would have us believe.”

A Real Woman opens with Bamba, a roustabout played by Colé Santana, one of Brazil’s favorite comedians, leading a gaggle of inebriated friends in a midnight sing-along and rousing the infuriated neighbors. The arrival of the police leads to a slapstick free-for-all, and for Bamba, a trip to the hospital.

There, he falls for his nurse, Amelia, who not only agrees to marry him but also vows to straighten him out. She succeeds. He lands a job with the fire brigade, and their domestic bliss is humble but genuine. Amelia then catches the eye of another patient, an aristocrat who—with the sort of cooperation from the head doctor that would get him fired if A Real Woman weren’t busily paying homage to the improbable but richly entertaining plot twists and turns of the screwball comedies of the 1930s—tricks her into marrying him.

Amelia scrambles to keep two secrets, one from each husband, and one close call chases another, each of them spotlighting the contrasts between the racially diverse and harmlessly lawless working-class milieu of Bamba’s world and the comically rude pettiness of Brazil’s high society. It all leads to one fateful night, and Cavalcanti clearly relishes staging the fire brigade’s race to the rescue through streets overshadowed by swirling plumes of smoke. It’s hard not to think that some of the imagery here isn’t informed by Cavalcanti’s days and nights spent shooting such GPO Film Unit documentaries as Coal Face (1965), a poetic ode to the redemptive power of honest work.