Redes (Fred Zinnemann and Emilio Gomez Muriel, 1936)

Fred Zinnemann and Emilio Gomez Muriel’s Redes is a completely absorbing hour or so of cinema – persistently stunning as observation of (at least apparently) real, challenged lives against pictorially transfixing backdrops, emotionally stirring for its depiction of social injustice, while also limited by narrative artifice and the unwarranted promise of its climax. The film focuses on a poor fishing community on the coast of Mexico, where one of the men becomes radicalized after losing a child for lack of money to buy medicine; he focuses on how the profit from their efforts flows overwhelming to the single capital provider at the top of the social pyramid, with the workers perpetually settling for almost nothing. He inspires some of his colleagues while alienating others, but in the end, after further tragedy, they’re all united, and the film suggests they might constitute a figurative revolutionary wave, amassing to wash away an exploitatively complacent society. The portrayal of the fishermen’s plight (interesting to note as an aside that women are barely glimpsed in the film, let alone being allowed to speak) feels as righteously provocative now as it did then, despite the mostly clunky portrayal of the complacent local master and his conniving politician sidekick. Among the multiple fascinating contributors to the film, the involvement of Zinnemann as co-director, long before his mainstream, multiple Oscar-winning peak, stands out: as with much of his later work perhaps, one can point to aspects of Redes which appear brave and ground-breaking, and feel grateful for its overall achievement, while yet feeling willing to sacrifice some of its craft and calculation (even Silvestre Revueltas’ grandly imposed musical score) in return for a more truthful overall testimony. But perhaps it took the test of time, and the repeated triumph of predatory capitalism, for that failure to become as clear as it is now.