Luis Buñuel began the 1950s by making arguably his first mature masterpiece, Los Olvidados; he ended with Nazarin, a cult satire that counted Andrei Tarkovsky and Pope John Paul II among its unlikely but influential fan club. The films he made in between are too often overlooked, and it’s easy to guess at why. Any neophytes looking for a quick entry point will go for either one of the scandalous early Dalí collaborations or one of those revered late masterpieces whose titles – Belle de Jour, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise – have passed into common parlance. By contrast, the 1950s saw Buñuel working in Mexico during the downswing of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, taking assignments from producers to adapt such overfamiliar tomes as Robinson Crusoe and Wuthering Heights. Surely, you think, this can’t be fertile terrain for an imagination as rebellious as his?
Well, personally I find the middle of Buñuel’s career the most fascinating part, and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, newly released on Blu-Ray by Second Run, is a great example of its pleasures. This is, on the surface, another adaptation of a novel someone else brought to Buñuel’s attention, but the circumstances of how he found out about it explain why this is more than a normal for-hire gig. The film’s lead actor, Ernesto Alonso, had previously appeared in Los Olvidados; he was also a former student of the author Rodolfo Usigli and thought Buñuel would be the ideal choice to direct him as the psychopathic anti-hero in a film of Usigli’s novel Ensayo de un Crimen. According to Jordi Xitra’s inlay booklet, the collaboration between Buñuel and Usigli was not a happy one, but that doesn’t mean Alonso was wrong to think the two men would be on each other’s wavelength. Whatever Buñuel found disagreeable about Usigli as a person, he was entirely simpatico with the author’s imagination, and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz is irrefutable proof.
Alonso plays the title character, introduced to us as a child with the adult Archibaldo narrating the story of his youth. This stretch of the film is set during the decade-long Mexican Revolution, although this doesn’t make much of an impact on de la Cruz; he mainly remembers a lot of people waving banners for reasons he was too young to understand. But he wasn’t too young to understand the difference between his indulgent mother and his stringent governess, the latter of whom scolds him for dressing up in the former’s clothing. The boy is vengefully fantasising about killing her when a revolutionary bullet passes through the window – and passes through the governess. In one unnerving shot of blood spreading on stockinged legs, we see the origin of a link between sexuality and death that will haunt Archibaldo de la Cruz all his life.
Like Archibaldo de la Cruz, Buñuel was accustomed to being seen as a criminal because of his imagination.
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Having set up a classic killer’s origin story a decade or so before the Italian giallo movement will make it a stock scene, Buñuel then does something entirely different. The title of Usigli’s novel translates to Rehearsal for a Crime in English, and this is the point where de la Cruz is stuck for the rest of his life. Time and time again he dreams of killing some unfortunate woman, and time and time again fate beats him to it, just as it did with his governess. It’s the sort of thing that Robert Hamer could have worked up into a bleaker-than-average Ealing comedy; the motif of the music box which de la Cruz finds is always playing as his victims expire also recalls Stephen King’s short story The Monkey (and its recent adaptation by Osgood Perkins).
For his part, Buñuel described the film as a light comic diversion, yet it’s not hard to see autobiographical resonances in the story. Usigli was bothered by the film’s anti-Catholic jokes, including a Buñuel-authored scene where Archibaldo threatens a nun with a razor, accidentally causing her to fall down a lift shaft. You have to wonder what he expected, since Buñuel’s first feature-length film L’Age d’Or infamously provoked a riot by a hard-line Catholic group at its premiere. Like Archibaldo de la Cruz, Buñuel was accustomed to being seen as a criminal because of his imagination. Unlike de la Cruz, Buñuel was a film-maker rather than an aspiring serial killer – but then, since all of his victims die before he can kill them, Archibaldo de la Cruz remains an aspiring serial killer, rather than an actual one. The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz often anticipates the later wave of serial-killer thrillers, but its title character is little more than a thought criminal, much as the film’s director was in the eyes of conservative governments across the world.
Despite his literal criminal incompetence, it’s rightly impossible to be comfortable with Archibaldo de la Cruz’s fetishistic need to murder women. Fortunately comfort is never a prerequisite to enjoying a Buñuel film, and this is as brutally bleak a satire as anything in his back catalogue. It would be too much, perhaps, to claim Buñuel as a feminist film-maker but his films can be successfully analysed from this viewpoint; L’Age d’Or affords its heroine the same uncontrollable sex drive as its male lead, while the plethora of films about artily disaffected sex workers that followed Belle de Jour were usually much closer to male fantasy than Buñuel’s film. Similarly, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz all but demands you think about why its anti-hero wants to kill women, and whether such a desire can ever be reformed. At its most audaciously satirical, we hear Alonso muse in voiceover that he wants to marry his next victim, as a man who kills his girlfriend is a sex criminal, but killing your wife is a grand crime of passion. It’s a magnificently nasty jab at societal misogyny and the institution of marriage, one which points the way forward to the underlying philosophy of Nazarin and Viridiana: sometimes, the existence of virtue achieves nothing other than fuelling new kinds of vice.
I suppose this is why I love his Mexican films so much. For all their artistic achievement, the later French films are too obviously made in a society where épater le bourgeois is something close to an intellectual sport, whereas in Mexico there’s much more at stake. Buñuel’s Mexico is a harsh, cruel world, but it also captures the Mexico that enraptured other foreign-born Surrealists like Leonor Fini and Leonora Carrington. His time in the country saw the great man adopt the guise of a journeyman, making the films he was offered rather than the films he wanted to make. And yet, as the auteur theorists who were gaining influence at the time would have predicted, his ideas and his outrageous personality bled through the surface of these assignments anyway, just as strongly as they did in Un Chien Andalou. How’s that for subversive?
The extras include one incredible archive find – Buñuel’s original script, with hand-written annotations, included as a BD-Rom. There’s also an in-depth, 26-minute discussion of the film from film historian David Wilt, and three five-minute video essays on the phases of Buñuel’s career from Cristina Álvarez López. These were created for the Institute of Contemporary Arts’s 2015 season on Buñuel, and their delirious visual excess would have pleased the late director: relentless montages of running motifs, intercut with rhetoric from Buñuel and his contemporaries. López also contributes multiple essays to the booklet along with Jordi Xitra. Devotees of Second Run will know that the back cover of their booklets always features a photo of the director, and this one might be the best yet.
THE CRIMINAL LIFE OF ARCHIBALDO DE LA CRUZ IS OUT NOW ON SECOND RUN BLU-RAY
