By November 1956, he was earning $7,000 a week (a far cry from the $2,500 a year he earned in 1940, beating the skins as a drummer in a hotel orchestra). All this good fortune led Russell to exclaim that "Mexico has been wonderful to [me]" and "has made me happier than I ever was in my life." Unlike the American movies he participated in, Russell was the bona fide star of the pictures he made in Mexico. He wound up making only five films. These movies were of the light-hearted, comedic, and musical-variety kind, where he had a fair amount of dialogue and singing duties to perform. Since they were being marketed not just for Mexico and Latino communities in the United States, but for all of Latin America and Spain, Russell was paired up with a diverse cast of Latin American movie stars, along with established and popular Mexican actors like Evangelina Elizondo, who appeared with him in three of his motion pictures. In these Mexican productions, Russell's roles were spoken in Spanish and peppered with some English phrases; in contrast, the roles in his American movies were spoken only in English; however, he sang bilingually in both. Russell had to learn "enough Spanish to star in film in Mexico and in Spain. His first director cast him as a Mexican reared in the United States (the case, again, of Russell playing himself), but after that his accent was convincing and he became entirely bilingual." His film debut in Mexico was "¡Qué bravas son las costeñas!" ("Coastal women are so temperamental!") (1955), directed by Roberto Rodríguez and co-starring Cuban actress María Antonieta Pons and Mexican actors Joaquín Cordero and Evangelina Elizondo. Filming began on 16 August 1954 in Churubusco Studios in Mexico City and on location in Acapulco. It premiered on 2 June 1955 at Cinema Olympia, where it played for 3 weeks. Around this time, Russell and Elizondo made a live appearance at the historic Million Dollar Theater to promote the film for the United States Latino public in Los Angeles, California. In his commentary, Mexican film historian Emilio García Riera begins his film review by introducing Russell:  Andy Russell (Andrés Rábago), Chicano of Los Angeles, who made a modest career as a crooner and appeared in 4 films in Hollywood, entered the national cinema transformed into an extravagant type of pocho' playboy, complete with a pipe and captain's hat, owner of a yacht, with a particularly obnoxious American accent and a languid way of intoning songs, a-la-Bing Crosby.