The old man (José Isbert) ambles through the streets of Madrid for the credits, also for the Umberto D. spoof, lit so the melancholy, slightly grotesque, can stream out. He arrives, out of breath, just in time to see fellow coot José Álvarez "Lepe" about to be transferred from wheelchair to motorized little car; after their trip to the cemetery, Isbert lumbers blockily through the cramped corridors of the home he shares with his family, the mobility of the new technology still dancing in his head. Marco Ferreri's sardonic study of geriatric revolt is about escape, as befits a Franco-set version of a W.C. Fields comedy, similarly spiked with offhand surrealism: a countess' overgrown momma's-boy pats a cooked lobster, a doctor predicts everyone's legs will be gone by the year 2000, "except for football players." Isbert and Ángel Álvarez sitting in for al fresco portraits resemble Renoir and Fellini side by side, but it's Buñuel looking over Ferreri's shoulder, anger replacing calm amusement when it comes to life's assorted absurdities and injustices. The aged protagonist's own legs are just fine; his obsession with the motorized chair spurts less from any willed irrationality than from a refusal to be merely swept under the rug by family and society. A Jesus statuette stands on display at the pawnshop window, and a reverse dolly frames an invalid José Luis López Vázquez, another outsider, left behind in a desolate long-shot, a Jesuit walking behind his stalled vehicle -- neglect, loneliness and mortality all but permeate the rascally comedy, the sustained long takes allowing the moods to shift and darken. What Will We Do with Our Old?, Griffith asked; McCarey and Ozu answered, then Ferreri adds poisoned cocktail to the survey, horror and humanity in Isbert's close-up, and no escape in the open road. With Pedro Porcel, María Luisa Ponte, Antonio Gavilán, and Carmen Santonja. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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