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There's a labor-management element to the Frankenstein story, Luis Buñuel has the uproarious bestiary to sniff it out. "La ley es la ley," snaps the rich slumlord (Andrés Soler) with the police on his side, the demolition of his tenement is complicated when the poor occupants band together. (Katy Jurado as his wife is gardening indoors and demonstrates quelling the revolt by snipping the heads off flowers.) A panning tilt from an ornate Madonna shrine to the slaughterhouse below finds the muscle needed, a thick-witted "mastodonte" (Pedro Armendáriz) dragging a carcass across the bloody floor. He cracks walnuts with his forearms to the delight of the boss' señora, and grins like a kid at the sight of her sprawled provocatively on his mattress. On the business side, he kills the opposition leader (Roberto Meyer) with a single blow and turns class traitor, meeting the man's daughter (Rosa Arenas) while chased by the proletarian mob. (He throttles her chicken to muffle a telltale squawk but replaces it bashfully in a dry Of Mice and Men lampoon.) A bitter awakening for those who "open their eyes little by little": Sometimes guilt is a nail stuck in your shoulder, sometimes it's a rooster staring you right in the face. Animalistic transactions for days, connotations as blunt as the sausages dangling at the butcher shop. Brutal only in certain things, explains the protagonist, his hungry tryst with the straying wife is a glimpse of burnt meat on a griddle while his deflowering of the orphan is a still-life of a gutted candle. An Oedipal Mexico of fathers and sons, Spain meanwhile is the wizened abuelo who absent-mindedly tiptoes past the stomped body to munch on caramels. "Falling, getting up, and falling again," so it goes with Buñuel's beasts and rebels on the way to the revolution. With Beatriz Ramos, Paco Martínez, and Gloria Mestre. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |