6/6/2023 0 Comments A Torrid Tango by Jude Johnson![]() This “Mountain Girl” (the only name she’s given) is played with hot salsa by Lupe Velez, better known later in her career as “The Mexican Spitfire,” here in her American film debut. At any rate, this seems to have been the thinking behind The Gaucho, in which the hero is a mocking, womanizing, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, bolas-swinging outlaw, a bandit chief known only as-you guessed it-“The Gaucho.” He and his gang come across the Andes and swarm into a mountain town, where the Gaucho finds an ardent young admirer in a fiery local woman, who cuts out a rival by doing a torrid tango with the Gaucho while bound tightly to him by his bolas. Perhaps it was time for Fairbanks to take a turn as a dangerous Latin lover. By the late ‘20s the vogue was for darker and more openly erotic characters as exemplified by Rudolf Valentino and John Barrymore, the latter of whom had openly challenged Fairbanks on his own turf with Don Juan and The Beloved Rogue. In his mid-forties by the time he made this film, he could no longer convincingly play the endearingly earnest youthful hero, and besides, such rôles were increasingly passé. ![]() The Gaucho was a very different swashbuckler for Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. ![]()
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