![]() ![]() They were the actress Silvia Pinal and her husband, the tycoon Gustavo Alatriste. It was at that time that Rabal decided to introduce him to two Mexicans who wanted to make him a proposal. ![]() He toured the places where he had been happiest, the Madrid of the Residencia de Estudiantes and, of course, his beloved Toledo. In Cannes he had met Carlos Saura and had made contact with some of the Uninci production company who were communists like him, but his visit was more personal than political. He did not forget to write to Rabal to thank him for getting him the visa that would prevent me from being garrotted in Spain and to tell him that he would be in Madrid in June. He was reunited with his family, first with his sister in Barcelona and then with his mother in Zaragoza. The actor did so and met an admirer of his work and a friend at the Spanish consul in Paris.Īfter 22 years Luis Buñuel was returning to a country which, as he admitted to Rabal, was unknown to him, which was not the one he had known. In May 1960, the director was again in Cannes, presenting La joven and decided to write to his “nephew” to ask him to pull some strings to get into Spain, as he was very close and his mother was ill in Zaragoza. The project did not come off, but Buñuel did not forget Rabal, nor Galdós. There is talk, above all, of being able to make it in Spain. The fact is that the film won the Jury Prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and was also nominated for the International Catholic Film Office prize in Cannes.īuñuel was definitely delighted with Rabal and wanted him for his next project, Ángel Guerra, another adaptation of Galdós. The fact is that Nazarín was very well received by both critics and audiences, but it was also well received by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, who did not (or did they?) see that Buñuel was criticising the insufficiency of Christian charity and how the ecclesiastical hierarchy would confront Jesus himself if he appeared in those times. Rabal wrote to his wife about how he discovered Los olvidados (1950) and was impressed by that “Maño” who seemed to him to be as brilliant as Goya. From that moment on, they called each other uncle and nephew and their complicity was absolute. The actor from Murcia went to Mexico with a bottle of Valdepeñas wine and an antique blunderbuss as a gift and won the director’s friendship forever. Buñuel had decided to bring Benito Pérez Galdós’ Nazarín (1959) to the big screen and he set his sights on a Spanish actor who seemed perfect for the role, Paco Rabal. So let’s start with the moment when the reunion began to take shape. It is a perfect summary of what that return of our most important filmmaker meant. What started out as a panty-dropping by much of the Republican exile ended up with its protagonist becoming a hero, always doing whatever he wanted and returning to the scenes of his youth, Madrid and Toledo, where he spent the most important years of his life, Buñuel delivered a film that was erased from history by the regime and could only be seen in the country in which it was made 16 years after it was shot, when Franco had been dead for two years.Ī triple comic vignette became famous in which, in the first, Francisco Franco is seen laying a carpet for Buñuel’s return, while, in the background, someone can be seen shouting Buñuel, you’re a provocateur! in the second, Buñuel hands Franco a gift in a box with Viridiana written on it, and leaves, the character in the background continues to do his own thing: Death to Buñuel in the third, the package explodes in the dictator’s face and the character in the background is totally surprised. Viridiana is one of the best films in the history of cinema, the best work of one of the giants of celluloid, Luis Buñuel, but it is also much more than that.It is the poisoned gift that this exiled gave to the Franco regime and which showed that the man who had gone with his pockets full of stones to the premiere of Un perro andaluz(1929) still had the same desire to provoke at the age of 60 as he did at the age of 30.Īnd if the film is a marvel in itself, everything about it is fascinating: how it came to be made, how Buñuel returned to his home country, how it got around censorship and how the Franco regime, which considered itself the guarantor of the Catholic religion in the West, won the most important prize at the Cannes Film Festival with a film that was considered blasphemous by the Vatican.
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