User Reviews

I have just read the review of this film and am absolutely... what is the word? The word you use when you can't believe how ignorant some people are and can't really come up to terms with their strange version of reality.

Franco WAS a dictator. It's just a plain straight-forward fact. When you can't speak freely, act freely or thing freely, you are in the middle of what sort of political system?

This film was made as pure propaganda, what else could be done when such a guy is in power? Something he will like.

The film isn't bad, basically most of it is footage and voice overs, but the content is pure reality-manipulation. As such, it may be interesting to watch it, as mass-communication-manipulation if anyone is interested in such studies. Nothing else.

Best regards

I can write at all...I´m laughing yet!! After seeing this movie... why not a Peace Nobel Adward for Dictator Franco??? Ha, Ha, Ha... It could be ex-aequo with Saddam Hussein!! They were both good people according to their regimes!! Ha, Ha, Ha!!

This movie is one of the best to show the former Spanish head-of-state. There are various biographies, mainly by English, that portray the General in his most negative aspects. This movie at least shows the qualities of him, not as a governing figure, but also as a human being that was raise as a child and became a hero in the War with Morocco. It is not only of Franco, but also of Spanish history in the beginning of the 20th century. It also shows the personal and emotional aspects of the wars and some acts of heroism. It also denounces the inabilities of the 2nd Republic, which is sometimes held as a pure democratic government, when in fact was not. This movie has many parts that show different sides of the General and how the Spanish history of the time affected him. However, the main point of this movie was made for showing what Francisco Franco really was: a man.

OK, I must be something like Grandpa Cebolleta, that nice comic book character who was always telling stories about battles he could never have been involved in. But I´m not that old (or as young as some other commentators). I was born in 1919 (and I´m sorry for being so insisting about my age). I WAS in those battles to which "Franco, Ese Hombre" makes very little reference because during the nearly forty years of Franco´s regime the film directors had the good sense of not touching that subject (The Civil War) more than half-dozen times and never to mortify or vent any kind of anger on the defeated. In exchange, in these nearly three decades of the post-Franco era there must be surely some one hundred films that have used scurrility and mortification as a support for their making. "Sex" (with the most dislocated derivations of Freud and the Marquis of Sade) and a grotesque "triumphalism" (?) have been the basic support of this post-Franco cinema or, to be precise, this "anti-Franco" cinema, because this was and is its nourishing thesis.

Is it not possible to talk about films without ever wallowing in the mire of politics (almost always of the same side, by the way)? Is it not possible to appreciate films for what they are and not for what they "should" be (or, at least, someone thinks they should be)? I see that some "ghosts" that we believed they had disappeared completely in the 60s have come out of their closets again. The Civil War is back with a vengeance (pun intended). We should call Tim Burton - what a delightful film he could make with this amazing ghostly army!

I might add that "Franco, Ese Hombre" is a masterpiece (by your leave, of course).

This film, as far as I know, is unique in being the only filmed biography about a Chief of State (not a dictator) who was alive in the moment of its making. It is an extraordinary document of the life of a man who gave away all his life to the service to his country and was capable of lifting Spain up from the ruins of the inevitable Civil War and turning it into one of the ten main world powers. Sáenz De Heredia combines extremely well the ample archive footage (perfectly accompanied by the excellent voice-overs, especially the narrator Ángel Picazo´s) with the present-time conversations with personalities such as Franco himself or journalist/ambassador Manuel Aznar. It is obvious that the movie was made with real loving care by its director and is not only a simple commitment. Those who´ve never got to know the genuine Franco (not the completely false and grotesque figure depicted by many misinformed people) should watch it with true attention.

I bet my life many of the commentators who show up in these pages are very young people and therefore haven´t got an accurate knowledge of some historical facts (they´re not to blame - the mass media have made them subject of a nicely crafted manipulation), and another reason to think so is that they can manage a computer (good for them!) and most people who are over 40 or 50 cannot do it. Well, I´m an exception to the rule: I´m a war veteran born in 1919 and I can deal with Internet myself. I hope this makes my word worthy of credit and doesn´t make believe that this comment is only the bull shot by an "ignorant". (Oh, what a delicious and respectful expression!).

I recognize that this film has some mistakes: it does NOT lie, but it doesn´t tell the whole truth either. That is the greatest error of the relatively scarce films made in Spain about the Spanish Civil war in the post-war - they are too kind. The first time I saw this movie in a theatre I remembered many of the facts depicted on it because I lived them personally, but I noticed that the director had passed on the Civil War. Sáenz De Heredia (whom I had the enormous fortune to meet) was not only a first-rate director, but also a nice and deeply Christian human being, and he didn´t want to re-open the wounds that had already healed, in spite of the thousands of people who had died during the war because of the hatred towards their Catholic faith. He only wanted to make a film about someone he knew and admired sincerely. It wasn´t necessary to do this movie, but it was done. Why? Because they who made it wanted the Chief of Spanish State (NOT the dictator, I must insist) to be better-known by the people, including the youngest ones. And, in my humble opinion, they were successful.

As an American would say, this film is "goddamnedly" well done: the photography is excellent, the script is accurate, the documentary style is nicely built and the voice-overs (especially Ángel Picazo´s) ring true, unlike those we hear today in many TV and film documentaries. And that´s because what they say is true. Things were really that way. If the statement which claims that in that era nobody could do, say or think what they wanted, how do you explain the fact that many of us are still here? We should have been killed or have spent several years in jail, as it happened in the USSR. Would it have been possible for some directors who were hyper-critical with the regime - like Bardem or Berlanga, for example - to make their films in the USSR? And how can you explain the queue that was formed to give the last farewell to Franco when he died? Oh, come on!

No lies, no propaganda, no "ignorance", no hate, no manipulation at all. Just the plain and simple truth.

OK. I just write here because I`ve just seen the (until now) only review, and I just can´t allow that guy to represent my country. Nowadays in Spain there are few people who thinks that Franco was not a dictator, or that have a positive vision of that tyrant. This movie is one of the most funny flicks I´ve ever seen, because it´s like a comic telling how the Generalisimo battled against the Forces of Red Evil and guided Spain to magnificent times of peace and prosperity. The reality?: Franco was an ambitious general that took advantage of an age of commotion to obtain the power, and just kept it by serving the interests of the rich and powerful, as he kept Spain in a permanent age of backwardness and decadence. That´s the truth to the 95% of my countrymen, at least. And this film is just the pathetic example of the cheap propaganda he used to kept the power. I mean, in Spain we don´t recall the figure of Franco with anger; I think slight would be a more appropriate word. So, if anyone is reading this (which I doubt), just be sure that, to my country, Francisco Franco WAS a dictator, and this films truly describes him only as "Perry Mason" described the real legal world (That´s right: nothing to do with reality).