Why a Book on Late Filmmaker Mario O'Hara? 'He's The Best and It Needs to Be Said'

(SPOT.ph) Noel Vera still remembers the exact moment he fell in love with Mario O’Hara. 

“It was a scene from the film Bulaklak sa City Jail,” he replies in an email. (I had asked him to be specific.) The one “where the prison guard was hunting Nora Aunor through a garden full of statues.” In an essay on the film, Vera goes as far as to lament that he remembers the scene to be a lot longer than what’s in the digital restoration, filling in details from memory to argue his case.

The feeling of love grew with every film he watched. “Later it was the arena duel between Dan Alvaro and Ruel Vernal in Bagong Hari and the ice house sequence,” says Vera. “I was hooked from then on, but on the basis of his technical mastery, the way it compared to the clean filmmaking in Hollywood but with a Filipino touch.”

“I've made it a point to watch his films since.” 

That was in 1986. 

Vera was a bank manager when he became a film critic. This was in 1994, eight years after catching his first O’Hara film, and after seeing Forrest Gump in the theater. Watching it inspired Vera to write a review—which was “possibly the first and only negative article on the film ever written in the Philippines,” and even going to the offices of the newspaper, The Manila Chronicle, into their newsroom to submit it. (The only other way was to use their fax machine, but since it was unsolicited it probably wouldn’t be read, much less considered for print.) The piece was published two days after. 

A star was born. 

The Quiet Man: The Films of Mario O’Hara is only Vera’s second book on cinema. As early as 2005, after releasing Critic After Dark: A Review of Philippine Cinema, he already said his next book would be on O’Hara and it would be called "The Quiet Man." 

He explains his choice of title in the introduction. “That’s a quote from poet-writer-artist-art critic Jolico Cuadra…who helped me wrestle O’Hara to the ground and demand he grant us an interview.” In the book’s opening piece ‘Three men drunk in a dim sum shop’ Mang Philip (Cuadra’s given nom de plume by Vera) tells O’Hara that he no doubt understands violence. In praising actor Dan Alvaro’s performance in Bagong Hari, he tells the director that, “Real killers are like that.” 

Rather than “the loud man walking down the street” he says to be “afraid of the quiet man.”  

Vera also points to “the rich humanity and emotional complexity” in O’Hara’s best movies.

“He isn't some intellectual making pronouncements on humanity on high but a dramatist who feels for his characters even when he's looking at them at arm's length.”

A few of the pieces are written in script format. It’s a form that allows Vera to quote movie dialogue at length, insert shots/sequences for effect/context, and play narrator to give comment and asides. Film essays on YouTube do this. But presented as words (with the occasional still images) on a page, it works. It truly does. Mainly because Vera’s observations are sharp, although his tone remains loose: he speaks with the voice of someone who knows what he’s talking about and is happy to tell anyone who cares to listen. This will be familiar to Vera’s readers: for being compelling for its passion, yet convincing for its economy. 

In the lengthier essays that make up most of the book, it’s that voice that stands out and makes The Quiet Man so enjoyable to read. In fact, I can’t name another book on Filipino cinema that’s more fun.

Fans of Vera’s reviews will be delighted at how casual Vera can stick it to the bigger players here and in Hollywood. Comparing O’Hara’s Mananggal in Manila to Peque Gallaga’s “bigger budgeted” Magic Temple, he concedes that the former has “almost no production value…and totally wretched special effects,” but that the latter “packs so much effects into its frame there’s not much room left for heart.” Or when referencing author Christopher Priest’s The Prestige he comments (in parentheses) that it was “adapted into a big-budgeted Hollywood film by some director whose name I can’t recall.” One appreciates Vera's penchant to even if not settle scores.

When asked why the book took so long, he says life. Vera has been based in the US with his family for over two decades. He currently works as a supervisor at a facility for troubled adolescents. 

At the beginning of this piece, I should have written instead that Noel Vera fell in love with the films of Mario O’Hara. But writing that—that way—feels like it falls short of what made him write The Quiet Man and to keep writing it over the course of 20 years.

Call me a romantic, but I believe that one can only write a book about a subject that one loves. And he clearly loves the director in spite of the shortcomings in the production. He sees past them, praising their lack of polish, and more than a few times pointing out how slapdash some of it looks. Without being blind to them, he remains genuinely smitten by their best intentions, if not this ideal he sees at work beyond the frame. It’s a love comparable to what the faithful have had for their saints. And surely Vera is devoted to making sure O’Hara gets his place and due in the pantheon of Filipino cinema. 

I ask him why this matters to him. Why it is important to put the spotlight on this "understated, soft-spoken artist?” 

To Vera it’s self-evident. “I think he's the best and that needs to be said.” 

“The first impulse is always one of love,” Alexis Tioseco, the late film critic, once said about why he writes. “Philippine cinema has given me so much, and one must pay one’s debts.” 

Clearly Vera agrees. 

The Quiet Man: The Films of Mario O’Hara is available here. His films available for free viewing online are Condemned, The Fatima Buen Story, Manananggal in Manila, Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos and Bulaklak sa City Jail.