Saw LA VENGANZA on the plane back home yesterday and was bowled over by the mise-en-scène. I’ve never thought of Juan Antonio Bardem, Javier’s uncle, as a great visual stylist and I have to think on the film some more. There were some scenes – maybe the most daring to film in 1957, the reason the film eventually suffered censorship issues – that seem crude and by the ‘communist party’ handbook and have the effect of taking you out of this most absorbing and otherwise fine-tuned melodrama; these are the ‘political’ scenes, the ones about labour struggles, oppression by large land-owners and the need for unionisation. But there is something about the co-ordination of the composition of the figures in and against that beautiful but harsh Manchegan landscape, the precision of the camera movement, and the use of close-ups, often and unusually of extras, that seem great and thrilled me. The story is a noirish one: a man (Jorge Mistral), falsely accused of murder,  returns to his village where his sister Andrea (Carmen Sevilla, then ‘la novia de Espańa’/ Spain’s sweetheart) eggs him on to kill El Torcido (Raf Vallone) whom she holds responsible. The siblings join a gang of reapers headed by El Torcido to be sure he is the one responsible for the framework before killing him off and restoring family honour. Trouble ensues when Andrea and El Torcido fall in love. The structure is interspersed with flamenco songs, the cante jondo variant, that work within the narrative to contribute to the distinctive tone of sadness, oppression, pain and longing that the film communicates so well. It seems one of those films that are great in spite of not every element working. I could kick myself for not watching it sooner and for some reason it’s made me want to rewatch, Marcel Carné’s THÉRÈSE RAQUIN, with Vallone opposite an extraordinary Simoe Signoret. The film was filmed as set in the time it was filmed – of personal interest to me as my Dad worked as a reaper for hire in those years —  but shown as being set in the 30s to minimise it being understood as a critique of the regime. It won the critics prize at Cannes and was nominated for an Academy Award for BEST FOREIGN FILM.

José Arroyo