OBSCURE GENIUS

christopher funderburg

luis buñuel's THE CRIMINAL LIFE OF ARCHIBALDO DE LA CRUZ

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the obscurity:
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz

When I decided to do a Buñuel film for this series, I assumed that because his commercial Mexican films are so unknown and I had seen most of them, that it would be easy to pick one that wasn't available on dvd or through netflix and write about it. Surprisingly, even deservedly forgotten titles like Susanna and Gran Casino had enjoyed some kind of home-viewing release, even if they were exceptionally cruddy transfers from budget companies that specialize in crapping out vaguely notable titles that happen to have easy to obtain or public domain rights. For instance, my dvd of El Brute broke after exactly one and a half viewings. Nothing happened to the disc, it just froze up and then failed to play ever again. Anyway, the somehwat easy access (several of them are available only as part of box-sets, so "somewhat") of the commerical Mexican titles makes their obscurity even more surprising - if anything, it sealed the deal on me writing about them. The only title that met the criteria for the series that I had seen was 1955's The Criminal Life of Archibadlo de la Cruz and, fortunately, it's exactly the kind of over-looked gem that popped up throughout Buñuel's time in Mexico.

The original Mexican title, Ensayo de en Crimen, translate as "Practice of the Crime" and that's pretty much an on-the-nose description of the film: a wealthy businessman decides to kill his fiancee and spends most of the movie practicing his various plans for the crime. As grim as that description sounds, Buñuel easily lays the melodramatic foundation and builds it into an almost good-natured black comedy, one driven by an all-consuming lust. The character of Archibaldo de la Cruz is played by an ingratiatingly aloof Ernesto Alonso, a producer/director/actor and the grandfather of the Telenovelas which dominate Spanish-language television to this day. An actor whose masculine charm and suave good-looks would've been right at home in Hollywood, Alonso knows the film hinges on finding him likable in spite of virtually every aspect of his character and strikes the right balance between "psychotic enough to spend all day fantasizing about murder" and "charming enough that we're never rooting against him." As far as the "commercial" aspects of a film from his "commercial Mexican phase" go, this one is out there. But again, the melodramatic form from which it is starting readily invites sex, violence and heightened emotions - add in a sopa opera impresario and that's certainly a better commercial prospect that say, Sandra Bullock as a badass detective taking on a pair of Leopold and Loeb like teens. Anyhoo, I do want to write about the idiosyncrasy of this film in the context of his Mexican work, but let's get to the film itself first - with The Criminal Life, the beginning is a great place to begin.

The introductory scene has to rank among Buñuel's greatest individual scenes - of course, that doesn't mean the rest of the film is on the same level, but the opening is absolutely classic, top-tier Buñuel. De la Cruz, as a young boy, listens to his beautiful nanny talk superstitious, fairy tale-ish nonsense about the family music box and its eerie ability to induce the listeners of its tune to murder. Just then, a bullet shatters the window and strikes her dead. A stray shot from a poltical insurrection has killed her instantly and her lifeless body slumps to the floor, her skirt hiking up as she falls to reveal the top of her black silk stockings, her lace garters and her shapely alabaster thighs. From that moment forward, in De la Cruz a deep and unsettling connection is cauterized between the tune of the music box and lust and violent death. The moment reminded me of Anna Magnani's murder in Open City, which has always seemed to me strangely erotic: it's effectiveness as tragedy is weirdly undercut by the fact that her alluring stockings are revealed just as she collapses to the ground. Furthermore, my reaction is especially mixed since I, as an audience member, know that this is only an actress pretending to be dead, but the thighs and stockings on display are as real as any piece of pornography. Buñuel plays on the same tensions in cinematic device, but I'm sure he would take it even one step further and maintain that in reality during a war, eroticism still has the ability to overwhelm the human mind and that violence and sex get all tangled up even when decorum emphatically states that they not supposed to.

The film rest of the film is structured around a framing device following De la Cruz's attempts to convince a judge that he should be put away for murder. You see, by happenstance, as a middle-aged man, De la Cruz came across the music box. Upon hearing its tune, the powerful memories of his youthful experience possessed him: with the music box's song, his mind was submerged in an implaccable desire to once again feel that same obliterating rush and he became obsessed with a plan to decisively bring together sex and violence and relive that overwhelming youthful feeling. The die was cast: he would murder the beautiful young woman he is set to marry. Every time he heard the music box, his passion was ramped up and before long he was making preparations, deciding on a strategy and then beginning his practice for the crime. Now that his fiancée has been murdered, he begs the judge to put him away for life. From this frame, the film flashes-back to specific episodes as De la Cruz tells his story. For once, a flash-back framing device serves a purpose: it introduces to De la Cruz at his most repentant and shows that lurking inside him is at least some shred of human decency. It's pretty flimsy, but a semblence of humanity is necessary for the film to work: De la Cruz appearing before the judge of his own volition and begging for his (and our) mercy gives Buñuel the tiniest bit of leeway with the character. That leeway forms the base on which Buñuel and Alonso can build the tone of the film: without it, the humor would (at best) be the type of nihilistic, mean-spirited comedy which Buñuel always managed to eschew. As flashbacks from the courthouse, the specific episodes can slyly avoid moral tension: an audience needn't worry that De la Cruz will face justice and, beyond that, he's a decent enough human being to see his sickness and demand the justice himself. The episodes can then themselves have a level of moral elasticity rare for a commercial feature.

I wrote in reference to Viridiana, "his best sequences harness the energy - the joy even - of humanity's basest impulses without taking the teeth out of the danger and violence that goes hand-in-hand" and the best sequence of Archibaldo is the inversion of that: a comedic, even silly scene, that ends up sickening and disturbing. At one point, De la Cruz buys a mannequin and dresses it up as his financée. From there he practices the crime, "strangles" the plastic figure with a ligature, dismembers the corpse and finally incinerates the body in his pottery oven. The scene is an amazing bit of deadpan humor with the ridiculous scenario played entirely straight: committing extravagant violence against a piece of furniture is treated as deadly serious. The whole sequence is constructed by Buñuel to resemble any number of similar sequences in thrillers like Dial 'M' for Murder or Diabolique that generate tension by playing off the audience's natural tendency to root for the protagonist to suceed and the fact that they are doing something awful. As silly as the sequence first appears, Buñuel is just getting started. By the end, when we witness the mannequin's face slowly melting and think of De la Cruz's desire to the same to his unsuspecting fiancée, there is something undeniably upsetting about the violence despite the fact that the it was committed against a mannequin. It's scene that is hard to imagine any other director attempting, let alone pulling off. Buñuel takes the teeth out of murder and somehow makes it more disturbing.

On the whole, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz probably doesn't reach the level of Buñuel's greatest films. A too-pat, goofy ending most prominently trips up the film: it turns out De la Cruz didn't commit the murder of his fiancée after all, a jealous ex-boyfriend did the deed. He throws the music box in a lake and strolls off with a lovely young woman, a tour-guide/model briefly introduced earlier in the film. The tone of this whole conclusion is a bit too "nah, just kidding folks" to make the film a classic and it really does end up undercutting everything that came before. If you were inclined to criticism of his commercial Mexican phase, it would be logical to point to the ending as something forced on the film and he faced limitations in his stylistic/narrative choices. However, I have disagreement with both notions: 1) Buñuel frequently displayed a tendency to pat, ironic endings: Diary of a Chambermaid and Viridiana both use their final scenes to pointedly force the audience revise their thoughts on the preceding material. Exterminating Angel goes the opposite route and hammers home the point he had been making all along in as pat and goofy a scene as you can get. That it works great in those films, but stinks in The Criminal Life makes me feel less like the ending of The Criminal Life was forced on him and more like he just botched it - the tendency towards that sort of ending definitely exists in Buñuel. 2) The Criminal Life is very dissimilar from his other commercial Mexican films. Coming at the end of that era, this film definitely takes more chances and presents stranger subject matter in a more typically "Buñuelian" fashion that about any other one of his commercial Mexican films. The films of Buñuel's which it most closely resembles is That Obscure Object of Desire, the director's final work before his death. Both are deadpan comedies about a man consumed by a violent lust and the woman in the sights of his passion. Both films stick to a more or less standard narrative (in comparison to, say, the narratively meandering The Phantom of Liberty or the "irrational" narrative of Un Chien Andalou), with a single story couched in a flashback frame.

In this light, it's even stranger that The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz is one of the few Buñuel films totally unavailable on a Region 1 disc. The comparisons to That Obscure Object of Desire, even in terms of overall quality, are favorable. It's the first work that points decisively to what he would become and it has one or two scenes that deserve a place alongside his most famous. I personally think the nanny's death and the mannequin homicide as unforgettable as the toilets at the dinner table in Phantom of Liberty or the sursiks in Discreet Charm or the double-actresses in Obscure Object. It's certainly one of the films where his ideas about sex, violence, passion, emotion and perversion are most clearly on display. And I prefer it to Los Olvidados, the most celebrated of Buñuel's commercial Mexican films, one that I think is over-rated by European and American critics' and their long-standing love affair with Latin and South American poverty. For a supposedly commercial film, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz is a far stranger film that just about anything ever nominated for an Academy award and is comparable as a psychological portrait to Belle du Jour, Diary of a Chambermaid and Viridiana. That's a long-winded way of writing: The Criminal Life is not a flawless masterpiece, but it can easily withstand comparison Buñuel's best.

Strangely, its reputation seems to have waned in recent years: both Francois Truffuat and Jean-Luc Godard cited it as one of the Ten Best Films of 1957 - you would think their enthusiasm for it alone would be enough to have ensured it minor cult status. Their 1957 lists also include many films that they more or less canonized through their vocal and impassioned championing: Nicholas Ray's Bitter Victory and Bigger then Life, Frank Tashlin's Will Succes Spoil Rock Hunter? and Hollywood or Bust, Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man and Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd. Of all the films on their respective lists, The Criminal Life stands out for being the least well known film by a very well known director - and, interestingly, it's exactly the same kind of second-tier work like Bigger than Life, A Face in the Crowd or The Wrong Man* that those New Wavers specialized in, through the sheer force of their will, manuevering to "consensus classic" status. All of this just confirms my sense that it's notably strange that The Criminal Life is not a more well-regarded film. In fact, it was very well-recieved by the New York Times' Vincent Canby ("the only about town which I can say that it mustn't be missed") upon its U.S. theatrical premiere... 22 years after it was made. Canby goes so far as to cite it as the turning point in Buñuel's career and compares it favorably to Tristana and The Phantom of Liberty. That 1977 U.S. release of the film coincided with the height of Buñuel's esteem and relevance - it preceded the New York Film Festival premiere of Bunuel's final film, That Obscure Object of Desire, by just over a month, in the midst of the creative run that saw him drawing critical raves and awards for film after film - which, if anything, makes Canby's unwillingness to dismiss the film as a minor work all the more compelling.

To call in heavy hitters like Truffaut, Godard and the New York Times to bolster my point of view might seem a little excessive, but really I would hate that my enthusiasm for Buñuel in general to undercut the validity of my assessment that The Criminal Life of Archbaldo de la Cruz is in fact a pretty darn good film and definitely worth seeking out. If my perspective is too much that of an unrepentant Buñuel fanatic, then I at least have other hugely credible witnesses in my corner. Of course, they could have their point of view skewed by Calandian fanaticism, but the problem is yours if you can't see how enchantingly unique and remarkable even a minor work from the Spanish Surrealist truly is. An unjustly neglected film from one of cinema's all-time greats: that's exactly what I was hoping to highlight in this series.

* I don't mean this in a derogatory way; just that these films are not A Rebel without a Cause, On the Waterfront or Rear Window.

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