El Mago

An inept man played by Cantinflas finds himself in the middle of a newspaper and a magic act. He has to go on stage, does not know the tricks, and gets applause anyway. The people around him start taking him for a real magician. There are also women, and just when none of them seems interested in him the situation changes. Miguel M. Delgado directed this, one of the comedies Cantinflas made one after another in the forties. Cantinflas was Mexico's best known comedian and his humour rested largely on language: talking without stopping and saying nothing. For that reason his films did not travel far outside Spanish. The slapstick scenes and the magic tricks are the show.