Su Excelencia


Su Excelencia is a 1967 Mexican political satire film directed by Miguel M. Delgado and starring Cantinflas and Sonia Infante. The film is set in a parody universe where "Red" and "Green" countries are the political equivalents of the socialist and capitalist countries of the Cold War, which the film satirizes. Cantinflas portrays Lupitos, a chancellor stationed in his country's embassy in the communist country of Pepeslavia who later ascends to the role of ambassador and has to decide the pivotal vote of joining the "Reds" or the "Greens", therefore deciding the fate of one hundred nations.
Su Excelencia, the fourth Cantinflas film distributed by Columbia Pictures, boasted box-office success and is among Cantinflas' most successful films. with its New York premiere scoring a box office victory over Charlie Chaplin's last film, A Countess from Hong Kong, which opened the same week.

Plot

In a world where countries are divided into 3 subgroups, Lopez is a bureaucrat from the sweet Latin American "Republica de Los Cocos" who is stationed in the embassy of the Communist bloc country "Pepeslavia".
Lopitos, who is horribly inefficient but quick-witted, is invited to a banquet attended by the ambassadors of both superpowers. After the news of a series of coups d'état in Los Cocos arrives throughout the meal, Lopitos quickly rises to the position of ambassador.
At a summit of world leaders, the representatives of the two world superpowers, "Dolaronia" and "Pepeslavia", court the allegiances of third-world diplomats to tilt the balance of global power in their favor. The last diplomat to remain unaligned, Lopitos instead harangues the superpowers for infringing on the rights of developing countries to self determination, talking to them with his point of view as a citizen not as ambassador because he arranged his demise as ambassador one day before his speech.

Cast

The film's political overtones, and the speech by Cantinflas's character at the end of the film, where he lectures world leaders, have been subject of analysis by Cantinflas bibliographers. In Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity, Professor Jeffrey M. Pilcher argued that despite how Cantinflas's character "refused in the end to cast his vote for either side and spent a full fifteen minutes haranguing the rival powers in the name of world peace; nevertheless, he lost the moral high ground of nonaligment through his blatant anticomunism", in reference to the film's storyline about the machinations of Pepeslavia to get the character's vote. Pilcher also found the subplot about Pepeslavia assigning a beautiful secret agent to seduce Cantinflas's character "an odd plot twist", noting that the film was made less than a year after the death of Cantinflas's Russian wife. In his Concise Encyclopedia of Mexico, Michael Werner listed the film among those in Cantinflas's later filmography that were "preachy, tedious, and humorless", saying that in the final speech he "offers the Christian doctrine as a solution for the world's problems in an international scenario meant to represent the United Nations". In Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity, John Mraz was more critical; sharing similar conclusions to Werner's, but also adding that the final speech showed that " arrogance was unbounded", and that he was "taking himself very seriously".