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There's no wit more severe than Luis Buñuel, aboard the Freudian locomotive he envisions newlyweds poisoned by suspicion like a horrific anagram of Sturges' comic honeymoon in The Lady Eve. Before that, the camera briefly adopts the wandering eye of the wealthy, middle-aged bachelor (Arturo de Córdova) in church, panning ankle-level from altar to aisle and then tilting up from a pair of pumps to behold a demure beauty (Delia Garcés). Already engaged, she's pursued into matrimony by this "perfectly normal and sensible man." (A clandestine kiss on the patio gives way to an explosion near a dammed river, a droll sledgehammer note.) The gentleman is respected by the institutions, romantic in his own mind, and absolutely psychotic, gazing down at people from a tower and, like Harry Lime in the Ferris wheel, seeing only insects. "Egoism is the essence of a noble soul," he says to his young wife, a battered prisoner of his vicious fluctuations. From the local priest come only bromides, from her mother the voice of entrenched servility: "Just try being more understanding of your husband." A melodrama of derangement and a derangement of melodrama, Buñuel's study of churning jealousy lays bare the madness behind aristocratic chauvinism. The relation to Hitchcock's Vertigo has been amply noted, the one to Ray's Bigger Than Life not so much. The knitting needle in the keyhole, the pistol in the bathrobe pocket, rope and thread and razor wrapped in cotton—the panoply of obsession, "a deeply personal definition of love." The cackling parishioners of course become De Palma's prom revelers, the protagonist's zigzagging skulk away from the camera at the monastery is one of "God's crooked lines" so cursed and so relished by the filmmaker. With Luis Beristáin, Aurora Walker, Carlos Martínez Baena, Manuel Dondé, and Fernando Casanova. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |