la muerte de ciclista (Death of a Cyclist) (Guión Producciones Cinematográficas, Suevia Films - Cesáreo González, Trionfalcine, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards TCM showed on their regular “Noir Alley” feature an engaging movie from Spain in 1955 called la muerte de ciclista (Death of a Cyclist) – the actual credits list the Spanish title in all lower-case letters as if typewritten – that’s actually a good movie but far closer to Italian neo-realism than anything usually associated with film noir. Two of the production companies were Italian and so was the film’s female star, Lucia Bosé, who plays Maria José de Castro, a woman who’s married into a rich family, including a boorish husband named Miquel (Otello Toso, who looks like after they made Nat “King” Cole they decided to do him over agan and this time use white plastic in the mold). She’s drifted into an affair with Juan Fernandez Soler (Alberto Chosas, whose family had fled Spain after Franco’s forces won the 1936-1939 civil war; they had settled in Argentina, where Alberto had become a star in Argentinian films and writer-director Juan Antonio Bardem, uncle of modern-day star Javier Bardem, cast him because his name would help the box office in other Spanish-speaking markets), whom she dated during the civil war but drifted apart from when the war ended with Franco’s victory and she married Miguel. Now they’ve hooked up again and they’re driving through the Spanish countryside at night when they accidentally swtrike and hit a bicyclist. Juan checks the guy out and finds he’s still breathing, but because they’re both afraid of the consequences if they’re linked to the accident they just abandon the guy on the road where they hit him and leave him to die. Juan is an assistant professor at a local college in Barcelona, where the film takes place, and in some ways he’s a prototype for the character of George in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Like George, he got his job only through the intervention of a powerful brother-in-law and he’s not terribly ambitious. He lives with his mother, who perpetually nags him about either finding a better job or writing the novel he’s talked about for years.

The adulterous couple hope that no word will leak out about the death of the cyclist they’d ran over, but news starts to leak out. Juan first reads about the death in a newspaper he’s looking at while he’s supposed to be supervising a student presentation on analytic geometry, and he’s so flustered by the realization that the cyclist’s death has attracted media attention that he snaps and tells the student whose presentation he is supposed to be grading, Matilda Luque Carvajal (Bruna Corrá). He tells Matilda to shut up, which results in her failing the class and blaming him for flunking out. Later she comes to see him at his office to see if there’s anything she can do to make up the assignment and pass the class, as she clearly deserves it, and still later her fellow students stage a protest outside the university and throw something through Juan’s window demanding his resignation. Meanwhile, Maria is having problems of her own: a seedy character named Rafael “Rafa” Sandoval (Carlos Casaravilla), who claims to be a journalist but is really a blackmailer, has figured out that Maria and Juan are having affair and threatens to tell Maria’s husband Miguel if she doesn’t pay him off. Juan decides the only honest and honoirable thing for them to do is turn themselves in, but in a final sequence that reflects sone of the compromises Bardem had to make with the Spanish cdnsors (who acted in this case much like the enforcers of the Production Cide in the U.S. at the time) Maria and Juan drive out to the same stretch of road where the original accident occurred. Alas, while Juan is standing beside the stretch of road where they ran down the cyclist in the first place, Maria decides to eliminate him by running him down with the car, sure in the knowledge that her rich and powerful husband, who was planning a trip outside the country for both of them, can maintain her impunity and make sure she’s never prosecuted for either killing.

Director and co-writer (with Luis Fernando de Igoa) Bardem wanted this ending as a critique of Spanish fascism and its ability to insulate the rich and powerful from prosecution, but the censors vetoed it. Instead they have Maria swerve her own car to avoid hitting another cyclist, only she dies in the crash while the cyclist escapes unharmed. If there had to be an ending in which Maria got her comeuppance, this was a good a choice as any – it reminded me of the two versions of W. Somerset Maugham’s play The Letter, in which Jeanne Eagels, acting in the truly “pre-Code” era of 1929, got to speak the play’s famous final line, “With all my heart, I still love the man I killed!,” while Bette Davis in the 1940 remake (much to her irritation) had to get killed by one of the native boys so she wouldn’t get away with murdering her lover on the opening scene. But it weakened the film considerably, just as the 1946 film The Blue Dahlia would have been considerably stronger with Raymond Chandler’s original ending (Buzz, played by William Bendix, actually killed the murder victim due to brain damage suffered in combat in World War II) than the unbelievable one he hade to cobble together to satisfy not only the Production Code Administration but also the U.S. Navy, which made it clear they would not cooperate with any future Paramount production if the studio released a film in which post-traumatic stress disorder made someone a murderer.