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The link between arena and church is at once forged, a batch of sightseers step out of the Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral and the bullfighter (Anthony Quinn) steps in to stand alone before the Virgin. "All toreros are afraid the night before the corrida." "The trick is to be able to live with the fear, and still face the bulls with dignity." He jeopardizes his reputation by fleeing the event, a lethal omen involving his young protégé (Manuel Rojas) is the reason given, the tenacious Yank (Maureen O'Hara) gets to the bottom of things. "How does it feel to discover that your idol has clay feet and is hollow inside?" A recompositon of Bullfighter and the Lady, in Technicolor and CinemaScope yet with the same moral austerity in Budd Boetticher's rendering of the measure of a man. The filmmaker knows the milieu and speaks the lingo, "jezebel" steers lure the bulls into stalls during the rounding, the camera documents the process from high in the balcony and low in the corral. A sudden downpour anoints the romance in a memory of Ford's The Quiet Man, on the wings are rejected suitor (Richard Denning) and jealous diva (Lorraine Chanel). "Mariachi! Transition music!" The disgraced protagonist rekindles his fire with a cape improvised from a picnic quilt for a runaway bovine, aftewards he munches nervously on a tortilla chip to help him stammer through an overdue emotional revelation. (Lucien Ballard's cinematography all the while absorbs embroideries and macaws and castanets in lustrous studies of red and blue.) God, death, courage, the freedom to "be able to smile on Sundays," all pulled together in a sandy long shot before a looming crowd. Arruza pares the gloss down to the elemental, "a trademark of my profession." With Thomas Gomez, Lola Albright, William Ching, Eduardo Noriega, and Anthony Caruso.
--- Fernando F. Croce |