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Prose is not interior decoration but architecture, says Hemingway, the ornamentation of Blood and Sand is here scraped off for all the stark tension and grace underneath. Budd Boetticher goes to Mexico and finds in the corrida the form for his subsequent Westerns, the abstract arena where heroism is cultivated, tested, transcended. "This is the circle of concrete that surrounds death... And these are the men who play with death." The gringo (Robert Stack) is callow, impatient, a show-off in a foreign culture, the mature bullfighter (Gilbert Roland) is courtly and serene, with an understanding not only of the rules of the game, but of its elegant risks as well. The road to "stature" is divided along pupil and mentor lines until the younger man has to flesh out the lessons of nobility and sacrifice in the colosseum before a pair of charging horns. "El hombre propone y Dios dispone." Pounding across the sands of the screen, the bulls are primeval forces contrasted with the matador's controlled brutality—a soupçon of slow motion gives the documentary-style undulations just the hint of ritualized dance (cf. Deren's Meditation on Violence). The lady, meanwhile, gazes down from the bleachers like a Frida Kahlo portrait, gravely pondering masculine honor if she's Joy Page or, if she's Katy Jurado, seizing the sword and exalting it herself. Boetticher allows himself a few low-angled Figueroa skies, though his strikingly personal tale of athletes and aesthetes mostly shares Roland's distaste for "fanciness," sparely and ruthlessly burrowing into characters suspended between fury and art. "Why don't you try to acquire some of our fatalism, uh?" The iconic effigy at the close is painted over in The Magnificent Matador to cover the cracks, Arruza painfully tries to glue its pieces back together. With Virginia Grey, John Hubbard, Antonio Gomez, Rodolfo Acosta, and Paul Fix. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |