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"Quietismo" is but another name for the bourgeois philosophy of laziness, Luis Buñuel gives the loafers a good walk around the block. The close study on American comedy has Fernando Soler like Walter Connolly in a La Cava merry-go-round (5th Ave. Girl might be a model of inspiration), the opening scene finds him rumpled and soused and looking to scratch an itch in a tangled mass of legs and feet. The carousing is comical but pathetic, his wife's death has left the millionaire powerless against a morning routine in which the whole household, from offspring to valet, takes turns dipping into his wallet. The road to ruination is halted by the fraternal psychiatrist (Francisco Jambrina), whose therapy moves the brood to the slums to pretend all his money is gone. Clued in to the charade, the patriarch enjoys a bit of table-turning: "While we're experimenting, I'll teach my family a lesson." Reversals of fortune and hairy-lipped matrons in Buñuel's little jaunt of a hundred delights, many of them not nearly as conventional as they seem. (The climax blithely equates wedding vows with loudspeaker advertising.) The idle brother (Andrés Soler) learns the joys of carpentry, the hypochondriac (Maruja Griffel) no longer needs pills, the mooching son (Gustavo Rojo) finds his way back to school through a shoeshine box, and the ingénue-daughter (Rosario Granados) learns humbleness from their proudly proletarian neighbor (Rubén Rojo)—poverty-ennobling sketches to be incinerated the following year in Los Olvidados. "I've been working more than a mule and eating less than a canary!" "Then complain to the Society for the Protection of Animals." It Happened One Night's runaway bride in Mexico City, Mel Brooks receives it all with open arms (Life Stinks). In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |