ANKITO filmography

Ankito started as a supporting actor in 1952's 'É fogo na roupa'... less than a year later, in 1953 he was already top-billing in 'Os 3 recrutas' with Colé and José Lewgoy.

1953 - É fogo na roupa (15 March 1953)

1953 - Os 3 recrutas (15 November 1953)

1954 - Marujo por acaso (25 July 1954)

1955 - Angú de caroço (6 February 1955)
1955 - O rei do movimento - Aparício (30 May 1955) 

1956 - O grande pintor - (22nd January 1956)
1956 - O feijão é nosso - Petrônio Sensorte

1957 - Metido a bacana - Anacleto-Hilario (10 February 1957)

1957 - O boca de ouro (17 October 1956) 

1958 - É de chuá - Feb
1958 - De pernas p'ro ar - Benedito

1958 - Quem roubou meu samba - Leogivildo

1958 - ... E o bicho não deu -

1959 - Garota enxuta - Aporanga Popó (12 October 1959)
1959 -  Pé na tábua -

1960 - Vai que é mole - 

1960 - Sai dessa, recruta - 

1960 - Pistoleiro bossa nova - Inocêncio - Pistoleiro Misterioso

1961 - Um candango na Velha Cap - Tonico

1961 - Os 3 cangaceiros - Aristides Pelado

1969 - Um sonho de vampiros

'É fogo na roupa' directed by Watson Macedo was Ankito's first film as a leading man.

15 March 1953 - Watson Macedo's 'É fogo na roupa!' premieres at Rio de Janeiro.

on the set of 'É fogo na roupa'; from left to right: Raimundo Campesato, Ivon Cury, Geny Macedo, Edgar Brasil & Reginaldo Farias.

11 August 1961 - Watson Macedo's 'É fogo na roupa' is back in cinemas in Rio de Janeiro after 9 years which proves the film was still good. 

15 November 1953 - directed by Eurides Ramos 'Os 3 recrutas' is Ankito's first time top-billing a movie ad; actually haring this honour with fellow comedian Colé and bad-man José Lewgoy;  Adriano Reis plays the good-looking hero and Myrian Tereza the 'mocinha' (engenue). 

25 July 1954 - Ankito in 'Majuro por acaso' (Seaman by mistake) with Heloísa Helena & Roberto Duval. 

6 February 1955 - Ankito in 'Angú de caroço' with Heloísa Helena, Anilza Leoni & Consuelo Leandro. 

'Angú de caroço', 18 January 1955. 

22nd January 1955 -  Victor Lima's 'O grande pintor' with Ankito & Violeta Ferraz ´premieres in Rio de Janeiro. 

8 April 1956 - 3 months after Rio, 'O grande pintor' is released in São Paulo too.

5 June 1955 - Victor Lima's 'O rei do movimento' with Carlos Tovar, Costinha; Angela Maria gives a great performace singing Ivon Cury's 'Escuta' plus 'Francisco Alves' written by Herivelto Martins & David Nasser; Lucio Alves performs 'Valsa de uma cidade' (Ismael Neto-Antonio Maria); Black-Out sings Herivelto Martins' 'Tudo é samba'; Ankito & Stela do 'Escurinha' (A.Passos-Geraldo Pereira); Emilinha Borba does 'Ai vem a Marinha' (Moacyr Silva-Lourival Faissal).

1956 - Ankito em 

3rd February 1957 - Eurides Ramos' 'O Boca de Ouro' opens in São Paulo four months after having premiere in Rio de Janeiro on 17 October 1956. 

25 February 1957 - J.B.Tanko directs Ankito & Grande Otelo in 'Metido a bacana'. Young singer Dora Lopes performs her Carnaval hit 'Maria Navalha'. 

Ankito, Catalano, Francisco Dantas, Wilson Grey, Erik (make-up man) & Alencaster Guimarães.

Heloisa Helena listens to Catalano in 1957's 'O boca de ouro' - a typical Brazilian high-society milieu. 

10 February 1958 - 'É de chuá' is one of my favourite musical comedies... a this point great actress-comedienne Renata Fronzi was almost always included in Ankito & Grande Otelo's flicks. 

7 July 1958 - Victor Lima's 'De pernas p'ro ar' was another box-office winner with Ankito, Grande Otelo, Renata Fronzi, Renato Restier & the usual gang. 

28 September 1958 - '...E o bicho não deu' at Cine Marabá; in November it moved to Cine Jussara.

11 October 1959 - great musical comedy in which Nelly Martins is 'Garota enxuta' and shares top billing with singer Agnaldo Rayol. With more than the average quantity of musical numbers: Morgana sings 'Conselho'; Agostinho dos Santos accompany himself at the piano and croons 'A ternura que guardo comigo'; Ivon Curi  presents 'Menina chega p'ra lá'; Rinaldo Calheiros sings a samba-canção; old-timer Orlando Silva sings 'Jardineira' while old-style Carnaval old-style is celebrated throughout the flick with old hits like 1914's 'Ô abre alas' performed by Grande Otelo, Vera Regina; Trio Irakitan sing 'Touradas em Madrid' & others; 'Cordão dos puxa-sacos' and 'Eu sou o pirata da perna de pau' are also featured. Nelly & Agnaldo sing 'Pelas estradas do tempo'; old timer Marion sings 'Samba no morro da Mangueira'; Emilinha Borba shows up in a night-gown & sings 'Em meus braços'; 

11 October 1959 - 'Garota enxuta' would premiere on Monday, 12 Oct 1959 at Cine Climax on Rua Espirito Santo, 330 in Alimação. On the Sunday, from 10:00 to 12:00 AM Radio Tupi personality Julio Rosemberg would MC his 'Carrocel dos Bairros' with Angela Maria in person at the stage of the cinema. 

18 January 1959 - Victor Lima's 'Pé na tábua' with Ankito & Grande Otelo plus Renata Fronzi, Nelly Martins, Bill Farr, Carlos Imperial. 

21 February 1960 - Ankito's 14th movie as a top-billing star. Victor Lima's 'Pé na tabua' with Grande Otelo and Renata Fronzi plus Nely Martins, bad-man Carlos Tovar, Radio Nacional crooner Bill Farr, rock'n'roller Carlos Imperial and the King of Rumba Ruy Rey.

15 May 1960 - less than 3 months after 'Pé na tabua' a new Ankito & Grande Otelo flick 'Pistoleiro bossa nova' to cash on in the wave created over the so-called Bossa Nova, the new Brazilian rhythm that would conquer the world in a couple of years. The supporting cast is almost the same of the previous movie: Renata Fronzi, Carlos Tovar... with the inclusion of bad-man Renato Restier, mouse-faced Wilson Grey and the baddest men of all Aurelio Teixeira.

21st July 1960 - 3rd flick in a row with the trio Ankito, Grande Otelo & Renata Fronzi: 'Vai que é mole!'...

8 December 1960 - Time was fast running out for the Brazilian musical-comedy... 'Sai dessa recruta!' is only more of the same...

15 April 1961 -

24 December 1961 -

1 9 7 0 - 1 9 7 1 - Tião Carrero & Pardinho / 'Beto Rockefeller'

19 April 1970 - Brazilian country music royalty in the persons of Tião Carreiro & Pardinho - probably the best sertanejo duo in the history of musica caipira plus country comedians Simplicio, Saracura and Nha Barbina... they're all there. I wish I had watched it. I wonder if it's still in existence. 

19 April 1970 - Anselmo Duarte's 'Quelé do Pajeú' was supposedly the very first Brazilian production made in 70mm... 

10 May 1970 - TV soap-opera turned into a film: 'Beto Rockfeller' had been an artistic breakthrough on TV... it is doubtful that it did the same at the silver screen. Premieres on 19 May 1970.

11 July 1971 - Roberto Faria's 'Aventuras com tio Maneco' with Flavio Migliaccio, Odete Lara and Walter Forster. 

1 9 6 7 - 1 9 6 8 - 1 9 6 9 - 'Terra em transe' / 'Os Incriveis neste mundo louco'

4 June 1967 - Glauber Rocha's 'Terra em transe' is finally released after having won plaudits at Cannes and other places. 

5 June 1967 - Brazilian first TV movie 'Vigilante Rodoviário' spawns another sequel, this time called 'Missão secreta' (Secret mission) with policeman Carlos Miranda mounted on his 1952 Harley-Davidson or driving a Brazilian 1959 Simca-Chambord sedan always accompanied by faithful Lobo, his German shepherd dog. All the action took place around Rodovia Anhanguera km. 38 in the outskirts of Sao Paulo. The TV series started broadcasting on Wednesday, 3 January 1962 on TV Tupi. 

25 June 1967 - OESP review of 'Os Incriveis neste mundo louco' - the adventures of rock-band Os Incriveis shot by their manager Brancato Jr. who for a moment thought he was Richard Lester filming the Fab-4's 'A hard day's night'. The final product is dreadful.  

24 December 1967 - Carlos Hugo Christensen's 'O menino e o vento' based on a book by Anibal Machado; at Cine Gazetinha, Mario Fiorani's 'O engano' (The mistake) with Marisa Urban, Claudio Marzo, Helena Ignez etc.  

24 December 1967 - at Cine Luxor that projected MGM films Jacqueline Myrna stars in 'Amor na selva' (Love in the jungle) where she plays some sort of a female-Tarzan called Tarzana. Jee, what kind of trash is that?

24 December 1967 - 'Proezas de Satanás na Vila de Leva-e-Traz' with original music by Caetano Veloso.

10 March 1968 - OESP's review of 'Bebel, a garota propaganda' written by Carlos M. Motta.

1 September 1968 - Ronaldo Lupo is back after a long time away from the silver-screen with 'As aventuras de Chico Valente' with Luely Figueiró, Renata Fronzi, Maria Pompeu and Wilza Carla.

30 September 1968 - actor-directo Jece Valadão who became famous impersonating a 'cafajeste' (a scoundrel) goes back to the same portrayal... now 'As 7 faces de um cafajeste' (The 7 faces of a scoundrel) featuring seven great actresses among them Odete Lara, Georgia Quental and Norma Blum.

July 1969 - Reginaldo Farias' 'Os paqueras' at Cine Marco Polo and Cine Bruni-Vila Nova which has its clichet upside-down. 

2nd November 1969 - Oswaldo de Oliveira's 'Gangaceiro sem Deus' with Maurício do Valle, José Mojica Marins, Sergio Hingst, Annik Malvil, Isabel Cristina aka Guy Loupe and Zózimo Bulbul opens at Cine Marabá. At Cine Paulistano, Pedro Carlos Rova's 'Adultério à brasileira' apes Italian comedies of the same ilk with Jacqueline Myrna, Marisa Urban, Lucy Rangel, Sergio Hingst, Mario Benvenutti, Newton Prado, Luigi Picchi etc. 

Chanchada, schweinerein, ribaldry

Journalist Aaron Cutler has written an interesting article about the musical-comedy-films made mainly in Rio de Janeiro in the 1940s and 1950s the so-called CHANCHADA aka Schweinerein meaning ribaldry. Here's the article published on 30 October 2011. 

How many readers have heard of Atlântida Cinematográfica? The studio opened in Rio de Janeiro in 1941, and grew popular over the next two decades for its stream of musical comedy films called quaintly chanchadas (ribaldry). These were light, exciting black-and-white musical comedies, often Hollywood parodies. At its height, Atlântida would put out five a year using the same small group of directors and actors. Don't think of them as cheap rush jobs, though. On the contrary, these well-made movies are joys.

This becomes clear from one of the first shots of Atlântida founder-producer-director José Carlos Burle's 1953 film Carnaval Atlântida, one of three chanchadas I watched Thursday in good Cinemateca Brasileira prints. (A fourth, 'Sputnik Man', also screened.) The camera moves toward a door with the name "Cecílio B. De Milho" on it, and we see the growling, pacing, cigar-chomping studio boss (Renato Restier) inside. He's making an epic about the Trojan War. He needs box office, baby, and he needs a star to get it, but against his better judgment goes with two unknowns. The first, a moon-eyed, mustachioed, bow-tied fop (José Lewgoy), is enlisted to play Paris. The second, meek Professor Xenofontes (Oscarito), teaches classical history at a girls' school, and is thus the best possible person to play Helen of Troy. Yet when it comes time to shoot, our leads refuse to kiss each other, wrestling each other to the ground instead, and destroying fake palm trees as they do.

The rubber-faced Oscarito (real name Oscar Lorenzo Jacinto de la Imaculada Concepción Teresa Diaz) was a frequent Atlântida lead. His flailing arm movements inside a box he seems to have drawn around himself recall Chaplin's gestures; his leaping mouth and eyebrows, set into scared commotion by women, call to mind Jerry Lewis's. Yet he's closer to Frank Tashlin's Lewis than to the one Lewis directed himself, an agent of chaos who nonetheless belongs within society. In 'Carnaval Atlantida's show-stopping song-and-dance finale, he stands at the front of a large group, with a lovely lady holding him. He's pressed a little closer than he'd probably prefer, but still seems like he's having a wonderful time.

"Why do you have to do a serious Helen of Troy movie? Why can't you make a musical?" someone asks De Milho. He does, and the film we're watching follows suit, its last 15 minutes an extended stand-alone number as in 1951's 'An American in Paris'. Yet while the sequence in the Hollywood film is a character's fantasy, the chanchada makes no such pretense; 'Carnaval Atlantida' works more like Hollywood's earlier backstage musicals, in which the show is the group's way of continuing to have fun.

Another important group member is a tiny black actor-singer-dancer, Sebastião Bernardes de Souza Prata, who went by the stage name of Grande Otelo. In blessed contrast to Hollywood's racial divisions, Grande Otelo's skin color was basically a nonissue on screen, and he often teamed with Oscarito to form a lively comic pair. In 'Carnaval Atlantida', he plays a mischievous, false-beard-wearing clown who locks Oscarito's professor inside a steam bath; in 1954's 'Matar ou correr' (Kill or run), a 'High Noon', he plays deputy Cisco Kada to Kid Bolha, Oscarito's cowardly sheriff. Kada tries to shove the Kid onto a horse, and gets trapped between the other man's legs in the process; once they untangle, he excitedly fires gunshots into the air, which scares the horse into riding out of control.

Like in the 1952 Fred Zinneman film, the sheriff here waits to confront a bandit (José Lewgoy again) that he once locked up. Unlike the still, sweating Gary Cooper, though, Oscarito throws his hands all over himself, and eats as much paper as possible to try to keep calm. 'Matar ou correr's message also differs from its predecessor's; while Cooper's tin star must face the villains alone, Oscarito's learns that no man is an island. In 'High Noon', Grace Kelly learns, looking forward, that you sometimes must shoot people; 'Kill or run's female lead (Inalda de Carvalho) blasts at bad guys repeatedly, turning her head each time she fires, then looking back with a smile to see what she's hit.

To show the theme of group solidarity, director Carlos Manga (promoted after directing 'Carnaval Atlantida's musical sequences) arranges his group shots elegantly and beautifully, placing people at different, overlapping points throughout the frame to give a sense of depth of field. The cowboys address each other at angles, roaming throughout the bar or jail space while drinking, the details of guns, farm tools, and bits of everyday life kept in focus behind them the whole time. This is very different from 'High Noon', which prefers one- or two-shots and frames people talking in straight lines. Its style is closer to that of Howard Hawks's 'Rio Bravo', a great response to 'High Noon', even more impressive for doing what Hawks did five years earlier.

A key western staple is the climactic gunfight, in which the hero duels the villain and proves his courage. 'Matar ou correr' feels no need to prove this; the Kid is a hero in spite of himself, and in fumbling for his gun accidentally shoots the bad guy in the hand. He can then be fully happy in the community where he belongs. In contrast to the rigorously ordered social codes of many westerns, with people ordered along lines of race, class, and sex, everyone celebrates together in 'Kill or run' with a carnival spirit. The ending even spots up the western's implicit homoeroticism, as Cisco and the Kid see an amorous couple and, overjoyed, start making out.

Oscarito appears Otelo-less in the same year's 'Nem Sansão, nem Dalila' ('Neither Samsom nor Delilah', which Manga also directed. The film's first 10 minutes could be called 'Barbershop madness', as Oscarito's scrawny shaver lifts the wig off of a big, burly, bald client who in his outraged vanity proceeds to wreck the place. The little fellow drives away, and crashes into a house where a scientist has built a time machine, hurtling him back to ancient times. He has held onto the wig, which now gives him super strength; he's found the power to impress people, and political candidacy follows. He strides beneath a banner proclaiming "Samson - Man of Action," dictating to his secretary as she writes with hammer and chisel. The campaign plans real progress for its backward constituency; its leader cries out, "I'm going to make a film industry, and only one state bank!"

Like a lot of contemporaneous Hollywood comedies (including the best Tashlin-Lewis film, 'Artists and Models', 'Neither Samson nor Delilah' eventually turns into an action movie. Each person and object gets the chance to cause a little havoc, including the hero's jeep, which returns to send a gigantic, solemn statue crashing into frame. Manga organizes the destruction through clean framing and editing, which makes it funnier. It's almost needless to say that this film is better than any of the Biblical epics it sends up, just as 'Carnaval Atlantida's musical looks better than its Trojan tripe. But I'd go even further, and call Manga a case for further study; more films could show him to be as gifted a comic filmmaker as the best American clowners of the 1950s and 1960s (Tashlin, Blake Edwards, and Billy Wilder).

These three films were the first Atlântida films I'd seen, and first chanchadas. (A sex-heavy variant called pornochanchada emerged in the 1970s.) 

I'd like to see many more, including Manga-Oscarito pairings like 1953's 'Double the noise' (A dupla do barulho), 1955's 'War on Samba' ('Guerra ao samba'), 1956's 'Sprouts College' (Colégio de brotos), 1959's 'This is my million' (Esse milhão é meu), and 1957's 'De vento em pop' (translated, this 1957 prizewinner might be 'In full swing'). 

Though well-known and beloved in Brazil, these films sorely need greater international exposure. Film historians, programmers, and critics can get so caught up in researching the American studio system that they don't realize other national cinemas not just studied and imitated Hollywood filmmaking, but did it better.

The Sao Paulo International Film Festival run as of 3rd November 2011. 

'Carnaval Atlantida', 'Kill or run' (Matar ou correr) and 'Neither Samson nor Delilah' (Nem Sansão, nem Dalila). Sao Paulo International Film Festival 2011.