Latin lover

Latin lover is a stereotypical stock character, part of the Hollywood star system. It appeared for the first time in Hollywood in the 1920s and, for the most part, lost popularity during World War II. In time, the type evolved, developing various local variants and gradually incorporating attributes other than the originally defining physical characteristics. Characteristics The Latin lover was the first male acting type in the history of filmmaking whose behavior and destiny are set through his love relations with a woman, hence 'lover' though, as the type was depicted in the beginning, the term 'seducer' would be more suitable. Major characteristics describing the type include: appearance; he is always handsome or, for the reigning standard of the period, different or atypically looking. behavior; the way he conquers women, using focused, sharp glare, and certain mannerism characterized by outbursts of passion, dancing, etc. type of roles; he is usually a romantic, exotic hero and foreigner, mostly a historical person or character in literature, often a victim of an intrigue which insinuates the doomed affair. genre; mostly melodramas, and if it happens to be some other type of a movie, it must have melodramatic overtones. When he appeared, the Latin lover was opposed to the absolutely dominant type of male character in Hollywood at the time, a man of action, who represented a fighter for justice, freedom or some other cause. At the same time, the Latin lover was the first distinct non-American type. It was the result of several factors: crisis of faith in the supremacy of a male as a consequence of the horrors of World War I, growing female emancipation but also Hollywood's effort to conquer the film markets of Europe, whose audience was deemed more refined at the time. Due to the non-American attributes of the type and a fact that a noticeable number of European actors moved their careers to Hollywood, some film historians, like Enno Patalas, prefer the term 'stranger' instead of a 'lover'.