The following are the program notes I wrote for the screening of El Gran Calavera (1949) organized by the Latin American Cinemateca. It is part of the Los Angeles Conservancy series "Last Remaining Seats", to unfold next June in historic downtown theaters. This film, directed by Luis Buñuel, will screen at the Palace Theatre on June 25, 2014.
Among the thirty-two films directed
by the Spanish-born iconoclast Luis Buñuel between 1929 and 1977, in France,
Mexico and Spain, El gran calavera is
perhaps the most undiluted comedy of his career. The filmmaker called películas alimenticias (bread-and-butter
films) those projects he directed from the late forties throughout the fifties,
as an exile after the Spanish Civil War, first in the U.S. and then in Mexico,
in need to feed his family. The
adjective in Spanish is used both ironically and seriously, because these
pictures allowed for his filmmaking career to resume after a long hiatus, started
by two still shocking Surrealist films in France, Un chien andalou (1929) and L’age
d’or (1930) and the no less disturbing documentary Las Hurdes - Land without Bread (1933). The huge commercial success of El gran calavera made possible Los olvidados (1950), an unsentimental
and brutal chronicle about children in the slums of Mexico City. (Amores perros (2000) is, in part,
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s conversation with Buñuel fifty years later about
those in the fringes of society).
Compared to Buñuel’s Mexican
masterpieces Él (1953), The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz
(1955), Nazarín (1959), The Exterminating Angel (1962), and other
melodramas and satirical comedies like Mexican
Bus Ride (1952), El bruto (1953) and La ilusión viaja en tranvía (1954), El gran calavera can be dismissed as a
hackneyed job, a white telephone comedy of errors with a by-the-numbers plot
involving the downfall of a rich and selfish family, through layers of
deception and intrigue. A world made
topsy-turvy by a widowed drunkard patriarch Don Ramiro (Fernando Soler) wishing
to teach a lesson to his family, becomes absurdly restored at the end, with
everybody learning a lesson about the value of work and responsibility. The wealthy are ironized and the poor
idealized – broad strokes that would be refined in his next films, showing that
in this imperfect world, good and evil are intertwined.
Shot in less than three weeks, this
nonsensical comedy, the second of his Mexican period, shows that the seeds of a
Surrealist universe shaped by irony and absurdity have been transplanted in new
soil: the satirical critique of the
bourgeois family, the clash between desire and social conventions, and a
counterpointing style that combines a popular film genre with a Spanish realism
and acerbic wit. No idealized indigenous exaltation in the leading style of
Emilio Fernández, singing charros or
exuberant melodramas.
Two funny scenes stand out for
their wonderful use of sound counterpoint.
In the first one, the enterprising working-class Pablo (Rubén Rojo) courts
Virginia (Rosario Granados), the millionaire’s spoiled daughter, now barely
making ends meet as a laundress. The courtship takes place in his van, fitted
with loudspeakers for making commercial announcements. The private conversation, full of advances,
retreats and innuendos, is heard by the neighborhood because the loudspeaker
has been accidentally left on. This
foreshadows the film’s climax, a perfectly timed duel between the words of a
priest in a fancy church marrying Virginia and the aristocratic bum vying for
her recovered fortune, and Pablo, announcing ham and female underwear outside
of the church. This juxtaposition of the
wedding vows with an over the top commercial speech yields pearls such as: “the
chastity of marriage … is only possible with stockings Sigh of Venus …”
A wonderful gallery of sharply observed
types – the hypochondriac aunt, the gambling uncle, the good-for-nothing son, a
no-nonsense physician uncle, the conniving suitor and his over-bearing mother –
give the story spice and flair.
Lightweight and fanciful, El gran calavera is still a pleasure to
watch. The proof is in the pudding: last year Mexican director Gary Alazraki,
from a well-known filmmaking dynasty, made Nosotros
los Nobles, an updated version of Buñuel’s comedy. Imitation is, after all, the sincerest form
of flattery.
Essential
bibliography
Francisco Aranda, Luis Buñuel, A
Critical Biography (1985)
Luis Buñuel, Mi último suspiro
(1982)
Peter William Evans and Isabel
Santaolalla, editors, Luis Buñuel, New Readings (2004)
José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez
Turrent, Objects of Desire, Conversations with Luis Buñuel
(1992)
