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The theme is the absurdity of tribal machismo, the camera pans along the top of a colonial edifice before tilting down to the dirt street where a three-way shootout casually takes place. A jibe during a Día de Muertos celebration triggers the feud between two families, generation after generation revives it in the small village where a gun is worth more than a horse. (Pistol and Virgin Mary icon occupy the same belt, even the local priest comes armed to a game of cards.) The river is deep and murky, people cross it either on the lam or in a coffin on the black canoe, the hero (Miguel Torruco) experiences both ways. A fragile amnesty with his nemesis (Víctor Alcocer) is held in check by the feeble-hearted mediator (José Elías Moreno), the sheer weight of hardened tradition and clannish expectations crushes it swiftly. Circle of hate, "costumbre extraña." The waste of vengeful honor, the enlightenment of cowardice and the prison of the bush, thus a superb Luis Buñuel Western. "Un mundo selvaje," it falls to the sons to change it. One is a medical student (Joaquín Cordero) with no stomach for brutality, his head sticks out of a vast iron lung when the other (Jaime Fernández) drops by to demand a showdown. (The slap at the hospital is returned later near the cemetery, blood from a wounded hand flicked onto a startled face.) A matter of letting the dead bury the dead, just an embrace on main street to break the curse, "cosas de hombre." Through Wyler's The Big Country it passes, to arrive at Saura's La Caza. With Columba Domínguez, Humberto Almazán, Silvia Derbez, Carlos Martínez Baena, and Alfredo Varela. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |