Latin lover (stereotype)

Latin lover is a stereotypical , part of the star system. It appeared for the first time in Hollywood movies of the 1920s and, for the most part, lost popularity during the World War II.

Latin lover was the first male acting type in the history of filmmaking whose behavior and destiny are set through his love relations with a woman, hence ‘lover’ though, as the type was depicted in the beginning, the term ‘seducer’ would be more suitable. Major characteristics describing the type include:

- appearance; he is always handsome or, for the reigning standard of the period, different or atypically looking.

- behavior; the way he conquers women, using focused, sharp glare, and certain mannerism characterized by outbursts of passion, dancing, etc.

- type of roles; he is usually a romantic, exotic hero and foreigner, mostly a historical person or character in literature, often a victim of an intrigue which insinuates the doomed affair.

- genre; mostly melodramas, and if it happens to be some other type of a movie, it must have melodramatic overtones.

When appeared, Latin lover was opposed to the absolutely dominant type of male character in Hollywood at the time, a man of action, who represented a fighter for justice, freedom or some other cause. At the same time, Latin lover was the first distinct non-American type. It was the result of several factors: crisis of faith in the supremacy of a male as a consequence of the horrors of the World War I, growing female emancipation but also Hollywood’s effort to conquer the film markets of Europe, whose audience was deemed more refined at the time. Due to the non-American attributes of the type and a fact that a noticeable number of European actors moved their careers to Hollywood, some film historians, like Enno Patalas, prefer the term ‘stranger’ instead of a ‘lover’.

Because of the American idea what a Latin lover should look like (dark hair, darker complexion), initial representatives of the type were indeed of Latin American or Mediterranean origin. Most popular among the first were Italian-born Rudolf Valentino and Ramon Novarro, born in Mexico. Director George Fitzmaurice, who directed Valentino in several of his movies, was very important for the launching of Latin lover character. Valentino is universally considered as the supreme representative of the type in the film history. Symbol of what lover should be and look like in the 1920s, his enormous popularity was enhanced by the unusual personal life and a fact that he was the first male star whose private life was compared to the characters he played. Building of the Valentino myth was sealed with his premature death at the age of 31. They were followed by other typecast actors like Ricardo Cortez, Antonio Moreno, Gilbert Roland, Rod La Rocque and Adolphe Menjou, the first who brought a certain measure of cynicism to the type.

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Wikipedia