People often say that fact is stranger than fiction, and a good instance of this is how Spain was a Fascist nation all the way up until the 1970s. While Mussolini and Hitler both had their regimes toppled 3 decades before, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco was seen as relatively benevolent by comparison. I am mentioning this because this film is one of the few I've heard of that came out of Spain while Franco was in power. As dictator, he barred the importation of foreign movies into the country, and all movies had to be in Castilian Spanish. While technically this meant barely anyone in the country knew who Alfred Hitchcock was, it's hard not to see a resemblance between this and something he would direct. Death of a Cyclist begins with (predictably enough) a cyclist being hit and killed by an automobile driven by Juan Soler (Alberto Closas), a college teacher. In the passenger seat of the car is Maria Jose de Castro (Lucia Bose), who is involved in an adulterous affair with Juan. Even though the person Juan hit is dead after checking on him, Juan forces himself to get back in his car and drive off. Both he and Maria realize that if this gets looked into, it could mean both of them taking a big hit in terms of social status. After Juan returns to the college one day, he sees the incident written about in the newspaper, and it weighs heavily on him. He feels a temptation to admit what he did, but he has to resist this for the good of Maria. While she doesn't have the same amount of guilt Juan has (since she wasn't driving), she eventually meets a piano player named Rafa (Carlos Casaravilla) who claims that he knows something about her, but she doesn't really pay mind to him. Later on at a gathering, Juan confronts Rafa outside a bathroom, with Rafa saying he's going to have to pay to make him keep quiet, as he knows his "dirty secret." Rafa breaks a wine bottle and threatens to stab Juan with it, but Juan plays off the encounter by telling the partygoers Rafa is drunk. However, he wasn't bluffing and the cops actually show up outside the place looking for Juan. He and Maria decide to lay low and make plans to escape somewhere, and they swear loyalty to each other. However, Maria has other plans. After he drives her to a place near the road (the same one where the cyclist was hit), Maria sneaks into his car when he's not looking and rams him. That night, Maria is on the road again, and in a display of shocking irony, she swerves off a bridge into a ravine to avoid an oncoming cyclist and kills herself. Because this is the first film from Fracoist Spain which I've heard of, I won't be too judgmental of it. Anyone watching this should know that director Juan Bardem wanted to portray the class struggle going on in spain at the time in the film's plot. It's literally evident right from the very beginning. After the cyclist is killed, Juan gets away pretty much scot free, although his conscience suffers. It's essentially saying how you can buy your way out of any situation if you're rich enough. Furthermore, when Maria betrays Juan and kills him with the car, she probably did it out of fear he was going to drag her down with him if he was caught. Her act of murder shows how she lied to Juan about really loving him, similarly to how the upper class is often hypocritical in what they convey to the rest of society. Politicians backstab citizens all the time, and as Franco's rule resulted in thousands of people dead, the slight political commentary of the movie is fitting. Overall, I liked Death of a Cyclist enough to write about it, even if it's barely known about today. It was made when fascist governments were still a thing, so it's interesting to see how this influenced it.
Review of Death of a Cyclist
