Fernando de Fuentes was among the most famous and versatile writer-directors of Mexican cinema’s Golden Age, etching his style on genres as varied as the Western and the musical. In his immigrant melodrama The Dressel Family, De Fuentes addresses the “problem” of the ferreteros: successful bourgeois German families who established their own self-sufficient community within Mexico City, but in doing so—it was widely felt—preserved their haughty colonialist attitudes toward the... see more