Jacques Gelman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jacques Gelman (1909 – 1986) was a producer of Mexican films.

Gelman was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia. During the 1920s, he worked as a still photographer in European motion picture studios, and became a distributor of French films. He arrived in Mexico just before the outbreak of World War I, and as a result of the conflict, found himself stranded there. In 1939, he became the third partner of Posa Films, along with Mario Moreno and Salvador Reachi. The company's prime asset was Moreno's comedic talent, and the three producers crafted and marketed the image of Cantinflas.

It was Gelman who proposed the recreation of European classics as a way to appeal to audiences outside Latin America. Los tres mosqueteros and Romeo y Julieta were produced during this period, and Los tres mosqueteros was selected to be screened at the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946. The endorsement of Charlie Chaplin had secured the feature's billing, but in the eyes of French critics, it failed to live up to Chaplin's proclamation that Moreno was the leading comic of the era. The French people, however, were not as hostile to "Cantinflas", seeing in him a Mexican version of their Fernandel. However, Gelman engineered the film's dubbing into French over the objections of Reachi, which may have influenced its poor reception, and initiated a rift between the two co-producers. The imitative efforts at universalization failed to appeal to non-Spanish-speaking audiences.

Gelman stood beside Moreno throughout his career, accompanying during the filming of Around the World in 80 Days and to the Golden Globe Awards ceremony. When the three partners disbanded in 1958 over the creation of Pepe, it was Reachi who was cut out of the business.

He and his wife Natasha were avid collectors of Mexican art, and became its patrons when they commissioned Diego Rivera to paint her portrait. Mexican painter Gunther Gerszo, a friend of Gelman, painted his portrait and gave it to him as a gift. Upon Mrs. Gelman's death in 1998, their collection was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and has since been exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum and New York City's Museo del Pueblo.