Vidalita

Vidalita is a 1949 Argentine comedy film directed and co-written by Luis Saslavsky and produced by Emelco. Considered transgressive for the time, it stars Mirtha Legrand as the title character, a girl who cross-dresses as a gaucho to be able to take charge of her grandfather's estate. Fernando Lamas stars as the captain of the fort, who falls in love with Legrand's character "to the point that he is willing to marry her without knowing if she is a man or a woman". Cast Mirtha Legrand Narciso Ibáñez Menta Fernando Lamas Amalia Sánchez Ariño Oscar Valicelli Milagros de la Vega Leticia Scury Reception The film was poorly received by the media related to Peronism. According to Saslavsky, they "find that a gaucho represented by a girl in disguise is a lack of machismo, of criollismo." Writing for Página/12s LGBT periodical Soy in 2022, Adrián Melo stated: In a key scene, Vidalita-Legrand finds herself in the situation of sharing a room where Lamas bathes naked and in another she dances with him in front of a people who are shocked to see two passionate men together. Only for this 1949 film directed by Luis Saslavsky, Legrand would deserve to enter the eternal sky with stars of the LGTBIQ world. There is probably nothing in Argentine cinematography—neither before nor after—so deliciously erotic and transgressive in relation to sexual dissidence, nor so subversive in dealing with two founding topics of nationality and local hegemonic masculinity: being a gaucho and being a soldier.