The Extra (1962 film)


The Extra is a 1962 Mexican comedy film directed by Miguel M. Delgado and starring Cantinflas and Alma Delia Fuentes. In the film, Cantinflas plays a man who works as an extra through several films. This was the last Cantinflas film whose art direction was made by long-time set designer Gunther Gerzso.

Plot

Rogaciano is the modest worker of a Mexican film studio, who performs several roles as an extra in the films shot there. His excessive zeal at work causes the antipathy of successive directors who do not support his forays into their films. After his run-ins into film sets, he dreams that he is the protagonist of each of the productions of which he has participated, such as him playing a sans-culotte and saving Marie Antoinette in a film about the French Revolution, being the lover of Marguerite Gautier in a retelling of La Dame aux Camélias in which she survives, and saving a maiden from an Aztec sacrifice by fighting a warrior in an Aztec film.
In one of the productions Rogaciano is in, he meets Rosita, a young woman who also works as an extra, who is initially disappointed in the treatment of the studio workers, who tell her that they don't need more people like her to work there. Rogaciano, seeing the situation of Rosita, who is the guardian of her two younger brothers and has economic deficiencies, helps her to be chosen as an actress in an audition for a blockbuster conducted by the directors of the studio where Rogaciano and Rosita work. After signing Rosita to a contract, the directors, having been made aware of Rosita's relation to Rogaciano, tell her that from now on she must not get involved with him due to Rogaciano's low social status. Rosita is reluctant to this, but Rogaciano learns this and, albeit heartbroken, convinces her to follow through it.

Cast

Professor Jeffrey M. Pilcher, on Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity, argued that in the film, Cantinflas "continued to perpetuate" a theme from his previous films of "helping beautiful young women live fairy tales," and that during his character's dream sequence about the French Revolution, Cantinflas "preached a conservative view of national history" by "inserting referentes to Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution within a monarchist speech in defense of Marie Antoinette and respect for a traditional, hierarchical society."

In popular culture

The film is referenced in the Colombian novel Érase una vez en Colombia by Ricardo Silva Romero.