Pepe El Toro

Pepe is a man who moved from carpentry to the boxing ring. What he earns is barely enough to keep his family. A fight ends badly and Pepe decides to give up boxing. But debts, illness and what the neighbourhood expects of him call him back. In the end he puts the gloves on again. The courtyard he grew up in, his sister and his neighbours watch every step he takes. Ismael Rodríguez's film is the last part of the best-loved trilogy of the golden age of Mexican cinema; Pedro Infante plays the same character for the third time. The melodrama is out in the open: poverty, sacrifice, fate. But the film shows the poor neighbourhood not as somewhere to be pitied but as a place with rules of its own. Infante is a name still loved in Mexico.