The Mallorca Files: "Death in the Morning" (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, BBC, PBS, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, October 20) I watched a couple of TV shows on KPBS, a better-than-average episode of The Mallorca Files called “Death in the Morning” (2019) and a Live at the Belly Up show featuring Bob Marley’s third child and oldest son, Ziggy. “Death in the Morning” dealt with the murder of British author Nicholas Mountford (Richard Cunningham), who was living in Mallorca to research a book highly critical of bullfighting. According to the script by Rachael New, bullfighting had actually been banned – and that turns out to have been true, though the ban only applied in the autonomous Spanish province of Catalonia; it was passed by the Catalán legislature in 2010 and repealed by the Spanish Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 2016, though even after the ban was lifted no further bullfights have been staged in Catalonia. Mountford is killed in an abandoned bullring while he’s there to research his book, and among the suspects are his widow Leanne (Amy Beth Hayes) and Victor Alzamora (Jan Cornet), security guard for the bullring and the son and grandson of famous and now-retired matadors. The gimmick is that Mountford is killed like a bull in the ring, stabbed through the shoulder blades from the back, by an assailant dressed as a matador. Victor’s alibi is that he was at the coffeehouse and bar owned by his grandfather, and when police detectives Max Winter (Julian Looman) and Miranda Blake (Elen Rhys) arrive at the bar to check out his alibi, granddad is hors de combat from over-drinking his own liquor supply and dad is vague and noncommittal about Victor’s whereabouts.

The police chase Victor on foot through the streets of Cazador, the small town in Mallorca where the action takes place (and director Bryn Higgins gives us some nice shots of Jan Cornet’s well-turned ass), and ultimately discover that Victor and Mountford’s wife Leanne were having an affair. In fact, that’s where he really was the morning of Nicholas Mountford’s murder: Victor and Leanne were having a “quickie” at her place while Nicholas was off exploring the local bullring for research on a book he was writing about a legendary local matador nicknamed “The Whisperer” (El Encantador). “The Whisperer”’s daughter runs a local museum at the site of the old bullring dedicated to his memory, and she turns out to be the actual killer: she dressed up in dad’s old traje de luces (“suit of lights,” the standard bullfighter’s costume) to kill the author. Her motive was to protect her father’s memory; she’d put out the story that he “died of a broken heart” on the day the ban on bullfighting. In fact he’d long been addicted to prescription painkillers he started taking legally as a result of injuries from the bullring, and on the day of the ban he deliberately overdosed and hence committed suicide. It was to keep this a secret that she killed Nicholas Mountford, though she wasn’t able to access the notes he’d made for his book that told the whole story. Rachael New’s script is particularly clever in putting Max and Miranda in situations in which they’re mistaken for a romantic couple – which they aren’t – including one funny scene in which an overly pushy waitress tries to give them a red rose to symbolize their “love.” I like The Mallorca Files and the best thing about it is it’s in a lot of ways a return to the comedy-mysteries that proliferated in American films in the 1930’s before the darker film noir style replaced them as the standard way of portraying crime on film.