Reviews

Outstanding adaptation of Alfredo Maña´s play, entitled "La historia de los Tarantos", that in a sort of time and space transposition of Shakespeare's classic "Romeo and Juliet", describes the unlucky love between a couple of young gypsies, pertaining to two different families, deep-rooted opposing and established in the now missing district of Somorrostro, in Barcelona.

Rovira Beleta´s cinema, seriously committed with Catalonia social reality reached and international repercussion with this fable of passion and resentment, embellished with the flamenco superb scenes by Carmen Amaya (in her las film appearance) or a suggestive, night life and irrigated dance by Antonio Gades through the beautiful Ramblas.

Wonderful in its chromatic esthetic and its interpretations, the movie brings a real vision, nearly to the documental pictures, about methods and traditions of this excluded ethnic collective, without falling in the trite and easy lucrative Spanish folklore.

At his first own picture, Bardem compiled some anecdotes of his parents life and took the exceptional Mankiewicz's "ALL ABOUT EVE" as an inspiration reference to certified and effusive document of affability and admiration to those mobile theater companies, that used to cross the wither Spain of forties and fifties with his modest performance. Emphasizing the longing of triumph that afflicts a young and slack actress, the film narrates with enviable intensity and a pompous visual formalism (with a foregrounds profusion), the miserable and competitive daily task that implies this kind of work; in an interesting social description that allows to think over some delicates themes, such as the dignity, the hope or the vocational doubt. In 1970, Bardem realized a musical version of the same story, "VARIETÉS", to display the downcast beauty of Sara Montiel.

Sociological document about the doubtful and transitory greatness of success, which commercial bump cut off Summers unruly and promising career, that since then would be focus on the most tedious and loathsome commercial search.

In a capable montage that mixed library pictures with interviews through a complex combination of acrimony, tenderness and sarcasm, the film shows the pathetic situation of some old figures (Uzdudum, boxer; Gorostiza, footballer; Villalta, bull-fighter; El Gran Gilbert, singer and show-man...) with the objective of recriminate the hateful competence of human nature for desert the same idols that it created with passion.

In the other hand, the report offers a cynical and exhaustive description of vices and deficiencies of Spanish sixties way of life, that, how it was to be presumed, couldn't dodge the pro-Franco censorship.