Vintage Portuguese postcard. Alves da Cunha in the Portuguese late silent film Maria do Mar (José Leitão de Barros, 1930).
The recent Bonn Silent Film Festival announced this rare Portuguese film as follows: " Documentary-like footage and avant-garde techniques are combined here in a striking manner to tell the fictional tale of the inhabitants of a Portuguese fishing village (the majority of whom are played by local amateur actors). For good reason, MARIA DO MAR is considered one of the best Portuguese silent films and seems to anticipate later trends such as Italian neorealism. In 2021, the Cinemateca Portuguesa digitally restored the film as part of an EEA-funded project to digitise films about the sea."
Indeed, the plot of Maria do Mar has elements of Italian films like La terra trema by Luchino Visconti and Due soldi di speranza by Renato Castellani, but also echoes Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. During a storm, leading fisherman Falacha (Alves da Cunha) calls up all his fishermen to save his nets laying in the sea, and all but Falacha perish. The families of the perished men, led by Aunt Aurelia (Adelina Abranches), Falacha's neighbour, drive Falacha to suicide, creating an insurmountable feud between the two widows: Aurelia and Falacha's wife (Perpetua dos Santos). Yet, when Aurelia's son Manuel (Oliveira Martins) saves Falacha's daughter Maria do Mar (Rosa Maria) from drowning, love gradually blossoms, despite the hatred of the two mothers. The young couple marry but are kicked out by the two mothers and establish their own house. When their toddler presumably is bitten by a rabid dog and the two old ladies, who first rejected any help, think the child has died, their conscience speaks at last. They all gather around the crib of the child, who hasn't been bitten after all.
José Maria Alves da Cunha, better known as Alves da Cunha (Lisbon, 19 August 1889 - Lisbon, 24 September 1956) was a Portuguese actor.
Despite the resistance of his father, who sent him to Paris to start a career in diplomacy, Da Cunha became a stage actor, first as an amateur, where he showed a great talent for impersonations. His professional debut was at the Ginásio Theatre in Lisbon in 1912, performed in A Volta de Nobre Martins, under the direction of Lucinda Simões. However, it was during his participation in Bernstein's play A Garra that he made a name for himself as an actor, and his performance was very well received by the public. He gained greater prominence when he joined the Companhia Rosas & Brazão in the 1914-15 season, at the same time as that group left the Teatro da República, which had been devastated by a fire, and moved to the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos. He was also a member of the Companhia Rosas & Brazão.
In this theatre he took part in several plays, although always in secondary roles, including Kean, by Alexandre Dumas, The Hawk, by Francis de Croisset, Mr. Brotonneau, by Robert de Flers and Gaston de Caillavet, Os Anos do Papá, by Eduardo Schwalbach Lucci, Os Anos do Papá, by Eduardo Schwalbach Lucci, A Última Aventura, by Urbano Rodrigues, O Fado, by Bento Mantua, Ciúme de Mulher, by António Carneiro and La Tante Léontine, by Maurice Boniface. At the beginning of the 1920s he started his own company, first as an individual and then together with his wife, Berta de Bívar.
Alves da Cunha was considered by the Diário de Lisboa to be ‘the greatest Portuguese actor of our times’ and was responsible for renewing public interest in the theatre, which had entered a phase of decline. His talent was evident in a career marked by various setbacks and accidents, including the destruction of the Ginásio Theatre in a fire. As well as Portugal, he also toured Africa and Brazil with great success. He performed plays by several famous authors, such as Henrik Ibsen, Nicodemi, Octave Mirbeau, Luigi Pirandello, Miguel de Unamuno, Henri-René Lenormand, Júlio Dantas, Eduardo Schwalbach Lucci, Rui Chianca, Amílcar Ramada Curto and Carlos Selvagem. He was also a theatre teacher at the Conservatory. His last plays were A Ceia dos Cardeais, performed in 1955 at the Monumental Theatre, and Joan of 'Arc, in the city of Beja, where he fell ill during the performance, preventing him from continuing to work.
In 1916, Alves da Cunha began his career in cinema with a role in the Brazilian film Vivo ou Morto by Luiz de Barros, co-scripted by Alves da Cunha and female star Tina d'Arco. After another Brazilian film, Urutau (William H. Jansen, 1919), Da Cunha moved to Portugal for Armando Layolo's short film Um Duelo Célebre (A Famous Duel, 1921), in which he simulated a fight with Nascimento Fernandes as part of a promotional campaign for Diário de Notícias. He continued working in Portugal in José Leitão de Barros's two films, the documentary with re-enacted scenes Lisboa (1930) and the fishermen drama Maria do Mar (1930). Several of the actors of Lisboa returned in Maria do Mar, like Adelina Abranches, Rosa Maria and Oliveira Martins. Alves da Cunha directed and a scripted a documentary himself, Tragédia Rústica (1931), in which he also had the lead as an old farm servant, who dies in Santarém, because of carbunculus fly contamination. He played the conservative father who prevents his son of moving to the US in the colonial propaganda film Feitiço do Império (António Lopes Ribeiro, 1940). He also acted in Duas Causas (Henrique Campos, 1952), A Garça e a Serpente (Arthur Duarte, 1952) and A Rosa de Alfama (Henrique Campos, 1953).
Alves da Cunha died in the early hours of 24 September 1956 in Lisbon and was buried in the Prazeres Cemetery. He was married to Berta de Bivar, who also worked as an actress, and had two daughters, Maria do Pilar Alves da Cunha Cutileiro and Maria Teresa Alves da Cunha Correia Ribeiro. He was decorated with the Military Order of Sant'Iago da Espada and the Medal of the City of Lisbon, and was the recipient of several public honours.
Source: Portuguese Wikipedia, IMDb.
