ABSTRACT
With a career spanning six decades, the iconic actor, director, and producer Fernando Poe Jr., or FPJ, derived his immense popularity from his mythic persona as a hero of the oppressed. This chapter examines how the changing aesthetics and politics of his understudied films from the 1960s and 1970s were shaped by a bipolar Cold War imaginary of integration and containment. Patterned after the Western genre, FPJ’s 1960s narratives feature a solitary, altruistic stranger who liberates a marginalized community from its victimization by politicians, bandits, and landlords. Looking at FPJ’s artistic collaborations with Lino Brocka, Eddie Romero, and Celso Ad. Castillo, this chapter analyzes how tropes of heroism and suspicion are reworked at the onset of Marcos’ Martial Law dictatorship, which persecuted its opponents as communist fronts.
