Su Excelencia

Su Excelencia (aka Your Excellency) is a 1967 Mexican political satire film directed by Miguel M. Delgado and starring Cantinflas and Sonia Infante. The film is set in a parody universe where "Red" and "Green" countries are the political equivalents of the socialist and capitalist countries of the Cold War, which the film satirizes. Cantinflas portrays Lupitos, a chancellor stationed in his country's (Republica de Los Cocos) embassy in the communist country of Pepeslavia who later ascends to the role of ambassador and has to decide the pivotal vote of joining the "Reds" or the "Greens", therefore deciding the fate of the entire world. Su Excelencia, the fourth Cantinflas film distributed by Columbia Pictures, boasted box office success and is among Cantinflas' most successful films. with its New York premiere scoring a box office victory over Charlie Chaplin's last film, A Countess from Hong Kong, which opened the same week. In his Concise Encyclopedia of Mexico, Michael Werner listed the film among those in Cantinflas's later filmography (from El analfabeto onwards) that were "preachy, tedious, and humorless", saying that in the final speech he "offers the Christian doctrine as a solution for the world's problems in an international scenario meant to represent the United Nations". In Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity, John Mraz was more critical; sharing similar conclusions to Werner's, but also adding that the final speech showed that "[Cantinflas's] arrogance was unbounded", and that he was "taking himself very seriously".