In Search of a New Spanish Realism: Bardem's Calle Mayor (1956)

By Stephen G H Roberts
The University of Nottingham

Published in:
Spanish Cinema: The Auteurist Tradition,
edited by Peter William Evans
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 19-37.

Calle mayor (1956), Juan Antonio Bardem's story of a group of provincial
louts (gamberros) who play a cruel joke upon a local spinster, had an
eventful history. While it was being made, Bardem, a member of the
clandestine Spanish Communist Party since 1943, a founder of the subversive
film journal Objetivo, and an organiser of the 1955 Salamanca Film Congress
which had been highly critical of the Francoist cinema, was arrested and
briefly imprisoned.1 The film itself was censored and an initial voice-over
was added which attempted to take the sting out of the work's critical
portrayal of Spanish provincial life by claiming that the events depicted
could in fact take place in any small town in any country in the world.
Upon the film's completion, it was smuggled out of Spain and, much to the
Francoist authorities' chagrin, was shown at the 1956 Venice Mostra where
it won the International Critics' Prize. This, together with the prestige
that Bardem had already earned when his Muerte de un ciclista had been
awarded the International Critics' Prize at the 1955 Cannes Festival,
ensured the film a wide distribution throughout Europe and the New World.

And yet, despite this success and the fact that figures such as Cocteau,
Clair, Resnais, Picasso and Sartre had signed Jorge Semprún's letter of
protest against Bardem's imprisonment, briefly turning him into the most
visible symbol of resistance to Franco,2 Calle mayor received mixed reviews
in the international press. Many critics located the film in the
melodramatic tradition and called attention to the fine work of American
actress Betsy Blair who, as the spinster Isabel, played a similar role to
the one which had helped Delbert Mann's Marty win the official prize at the
Cannes Festival in 1955, but Derek Granger in the Financial Times (23.9.57)
wrote that he found it difficult to explain why 'the appallingly tearful
spectacle of a jilted spinster' had left him so strangely unmoved. Other
reviewers, like the anonymous film critic in The Times (19.9.57), obviously
impressed by the initial voiceover, focused on what they saw as the
universality of the film, but Campbell Dixon in the Daily Telegraph
(4.9.57) claimed that its universal relevance was undermined by the absurd
cruelty of the joke played by the gamberros, for surely they would have
been deterred by a fear of legal and other consequences - 'or has Spain no
penalties for breach of promise?'. Almost every critic did manage to agree,
however, that the film had been deeply influenced by Italian neorealist
cinema in general and by Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953) in particular,
although in France, as Marcel Oms has pointed out, certain reviewers set
out to prove that Calle mayor was nothing more than a copy of Fellini's
film and of other works by post-war Italian directors. Bardem, they said,
should simply be seen as a crude plagiarist.3

What one finds in all these reviews is a desire to explain the significance
of Calle mayor through reference to universal bourgeois values or to
foreign cinematic traditions, such as Italian neorealism or Hollywood
melodrama. There is little or no attempt to understand the film in its own
historical, political and cultural context or to gauge the ways in which it
draws on, develops or creates a specifically Spanish cinematic style. The
implication seems to be that Spanish cinema, perhaps because of the tragic
history and circumstances of the country, was fundamentally and necessarily
derivative.

And yet these critics were of course making serious points, especially as
far as the film's neorealist credentials were concerned. This can best be
seen through a comparison of Calle mayor and the film it supposedly copies,
I Vitelloni. Fellini's film, like Bardem's, deals with a group of bored
young men in a small Provincial town. Both deliberately take the camera out
of the studio in order to film in real locations, in Fellini's case his
home-town of Rimini, in Bardem's, Cuenca, Palencia and Logroño, locations
which are then fused together to create the atmosphere of the unnamed
Provincial town at the heart of the drama. By doing this, they are able to
present the characters in their natural environment, the bars where they
drink and play billiards and the gloomy and deserted streets and squares
through which they wander after long nights of revelry. Both films also
draw attention to the fact that, despite their often antisocial behaviour,
the young men are very much a part and a product of their society. Fellini
underlines his vitelloni's fundamental conservatism by showing how the
histrionic Alberto can carry on his life as a would-be Lothario and at the
same time preach good Catholic morals to his sister, Olga. Similarly,
Bardem deliberately juxtaposes a scene in which the gamberros are drunk in
a brothel with another in which two of them, dressed and behaving
respectably, come out of Sunday mass in the company of their wives and
children. To underline the characters' double standards, both directors
include one earnest male character who stands somewhat apart from the
activities of the rest. In I Vitelloni, it is Moraldo, the only member of
the group who finally realizes the young men's dream of escaping from the
claustrophobic Provincial town. In Calle mayor, it is Federico, the Madrid
intellectual and outsider who, like Moraldo, frowns upon the attitudes of
the rest, especially their treatment of women.

In much of this, Calle mayor would seem to conform to the classical
definition of Italian neorealist films which, according to Peter
Bondanella, plays up their use of real locations and asserts that 'they
dealt with actual problems, that they employed contemporary stories, and
that they focused on believable characters taken most frequently from [in
their case] Italian daily life'.4 And yet, despite such similarities, there
are also important differences between Calle mayor and the neorealist
tradition as a whole. Over the past decades, several critics have attempted
to break down the notion that Italian neorealism was a school or a movement
with basic precepts which were followed by all its practitioners.
Bondanella, for example, underlines the differences, rather than the
similarities, in the subject-matter and style of the seminal neorealist
films and also shows how directors such as Rossellini, Fellini and
Antonioni were already, by the early 1950s, leaving behind an interest in
purely social and collective matters in order to create a more
individualistic, introspective and often poetic type of cinema.5
Bondanella's perceptive study would not seem, however, to invalidate André
Bazin's overarching definition of neorealism as a form of 'phenomenological
realism'. For Bazin, neorealism did not signify solely a preoccupation with
real events and people but also, and more importantly, a desire to capture
on film the direct experience of reality itself, to express
life-as-it-is-lived with 'its full force of vividness and detail'. In doing
so, it 'never "adjusts" reality to meet the needs imposed by psychology or
drama' but rather gives pride of place 'to the representation of reality at
the expense of dramatic structures'.6 As a result, films such as I
Vitelloni give priority to incident over plot and are therefore
fundamentally episodic, with each episode existing by and for itself,
'unique and colourful as an event'.7 Bondanella himself adds that the
film's 'formless' plot and subjective camera work allows Fellini to create
an introspective work which concentrates on the limited and contrasting
viewpoints of each character.8

From this point of view, Calle mayor would seem to belong to a very
different tradition from neorealism. First, rather than being episodic and
fragmented, the film is very much plot-driven and has an extremely tight
narrative structure which shares some of the tragic inevitability of
Classical drama. Secondly, the film is as introspective in its own way as I
Vitelloni and yet we are made privy not to the inner turmoil of a whole
series of characters, as in Fellini's film, but rather, as in a
nineteenth-century novel or Hollywood melodrama, to that of the two central
characters, Juan and Isabel, while the gamberros themselves are simply
treated collectively as a group. Finally, Bardem is not content to broach
social and moral questions in a more or less non-judgemental way, as
Fellini seems to be, but has recourse to a number of devices which, as we
shall see, enable the film to be openly moralistic and even didactic. But,
as Bardem himself has pointed out, there is another, perhaps more
fundamental difference between his film and I Vitelloni (and, by extension,
neorealist cinema). While always acknowledging his debt to Fellini's film,9
he also pointed out in the Italian journal Cinema Nuovo that Fellini's
vitelloni are young men whose misdemeanours could be put down to their
adolescent childishness while his own male characters 'sono delle persone
"serie", sistemate, sono dei professionisti; e il loro comportamento,
quindi, è, dal punto di vista umano e sociale, ancora piú grave'.10 They
are in fact a group of professionals, a doctor, a lawyer, a bank clerk, a
shopowner and a journalist, obvious representatives of the social forces at
work in their small Provincial town and, indeed, their country. This
seemingly insignificant distinction actually points to an essential
cultural and historical difference between the two films. By chronicling
the lives of a group of young men and their dreams of escaping to the big
city, Fellini is able to study a mobile post-fascist country faced with the
allure and problems of migration. Bardem, meanwhile, is portraying the
forces at work in a society which, dominated by a Dictatorship, is still
fundamentally conservative and static. Given the very different realities
that the two directors are dealing with, it should not therefore be
surprising that Calle mayor, while acknowledging its debt to neorealism, is
actually rooted in different traditions and moving in a different
direction: a direction which, this article claims, is essentially Spanish
in nature.

A few reviewers of the time realised this and emphasised the specifically
Spanish nature of the film, although most of these were film critics in the
Spanish press who felt that they had a patriotic duty to play up the film's
originality. J.M. García Escudero, for example, who had been Franco's Under
Secretary of Cinema between September 1951 and February 1952, underlined
that Calle mayor should be seen as a work not of neorealism (a term with
strong Italian associations) but rather of 'cine social'.11 But the most
clear-sighted review of all came from a very different source, that of
Guido Aristarco in Cinema Nuovo. Aristarco, a Marxist critic and leading
champion of Italian neorealism, had recently lived through Mussolini's
régime, a fact which made him particularly sensitive to the context in
which Calle mayor had been made and the sorts of issues dealt with in the
film. As a result, he was the first critic to emphasise that the film can
only be fully understood in its own historical and cultural terms. Bardem's
subject-matter is his own country, a nation languishing under a
Dictatorship, and his film therefore has a language of its own.12 The
question which we must ask ourselves now is: what exactly was this
language, what traditions was Bardem drawing upon in Calle mayor, what sort
of cinema was he actually trying to create?

The best starting-point for our enquiry is without doubt Bardem's own
words. The director has almost always referred to himself simply as a
realist,13 and has often pointed out that he was first made aware of the
potential of cinematic realism during the Italian film week which was held
in Madrid in 1951.14 His exposure at that time to the films of De Sica,
Antonioni and Visconti led him to realise that neorealism had managed to
'acercarnos al hombre, al prójimo, sin desarraigarle de su entorno y
construir con él y sobre él el corazón palpitante del film'.15 And yet
Bardem has always emphasised that a truly realist cinema should act as a
testimony to a specific historical moment, that its duty is to 'mostrar en
un lenguaje de luces, imágenes, sonidos, la auténtica realidad de nuestro
mundo, de nuestro ambiente cotidiano, "aquí y ahora", en el lugar donde
vivimos hoy'.16 It is a 'testimonio de un momento humano en un instante
dado y en un determinado espacio'17 and, for Bardem, that instant and that
space are very much 'el mundo español hoy'.18 It is for this reason that
Bardem made a clear distinction in 1957 between 'el neorrealismo italiano'
and 'ese realismo español que algunos y yo pretendemos hacer'.19 The
implication would seem to be clear: Spanish filmmakers have to find Spanish
ways of dealing with Spanish reality.

All this Bardem made patently clear in his talk at the First National Film
Congress held at Salamanca in May 1955, a talk which is of particular
relevance to us as it was delivered as Bardem was preparing himself to
write the screenplay for Calle mayor. Bardem's speech is rightly remembered
for its brave attack on the Francoist cinema which he claimed to be
'políticamente ineficaz, socialmente falso, intelectualmente ínfimo,
estéticamente nulo, industrialmente raquítico'. However, his main point is
that the officially-sanctioned films of the 1940s and 1950s - the military
and religious dramas, the historical epics and the folkloric musicals 21-
have turned their backs on reality with the result that the Spanish cinema
'no ha sido aún capaz de mostrarnos el verdadero rostro de los problemas,
las tierras y los hombres de España'.22 What Spain now needs, he goes on to
say, is a realist and socially-committed cinema which can reflect and
reflect upon the nature of Spanish reality. This would be a truly national
cinema, 'nuestro cine, el cine español'.23 And Bardem indirectly suggests a
way in which such a cinema can be created when he passionately defends 'la
estupenda tradición realista de nuestra novela' which he claims has been
betrayed by the anti-realist escapism of Francoist films.24 What Bardem
seems to be implying, therefore, is that Spain's new cinema can be built
upon a past, and essentially literary, tradition. This is a view which he
restated in his Cinema Nuovo interview of 1957 when, after yet again
declaring his belief in the testimonial power of realism, he explained
that: 'Usando questa parola [realismo], penso al cinema neorealistico
italiano, che è probabilmente la forma italiana del realismo, e penso, di
piú, alla tradizione artistica spagnola, richissima, dalla letteratura alla
pittura, di opere realistiche'.25

If we now turn once again to Calle mayor, we can see that Bardem's
starting-point for his recuperation of lost Spanish traditions in this film
was his use of Carlos Arniches' comic farce La señorita de Trevélez (1916).
That Bardem should decide to base his film on this classic of the early
twentieth-century Spanish theatre should come as no surprise. For one
thing, Arniches' dramatic work was well known for its popular realism, for
its treatment of everyday themes through the use of typical, and often
stereotypical, characters. For another, he was without doubt the most
successful dramatist of the first decades of this century and his plays
appealed to a wide cross-section of the Spanish public who found their own
concerns reflected in the humorous events depicted on stage. Finally,
several directors of the 1920s and 1930s had already translated his works
from stage to screen and one of the most successful of these adaptations
had been the Spanish director Edgar Neville's 1936 version of La señorita
de Trevélez itself, a film which used the original play almost as freely as
Bardem would. It is interesting, therefore, to compare and contrast these
three versions and also to see to what degree they reflect the cultural and
historical moment of their making (1916, 1936 and 1956).

La señorita de Trevélez marked a turning-point in Arniches' career as a
dramatist. It retains many elements of the sainete or género chico, the
genre which Arniches had helped to perfect,26 especially in its use of
stock characters, farcical situations and complicated plot. At the heart of
the story is the joke which Picavea and his chums in the so-called "Guasa
club" play on Numeriano Galán, Picavea's rival in love. Picavea sends a
forged marriage proposal from Galán to Flora de Trevélez, the local
spinster, thereby compromising him in the eyes of Flora, her
over-protective brother Gonzalo and the whole Provincial town. Most of the
play is taken up with showing how Galán and Picavea try to escape from
their predicaments, only to find themselves slipping ever deeper into the
mire, and a great deal of comic mileage is extracted from the ridiculous
situations that they are placed in. But much of the humour in the play
comes from the characters themselves, especially Gonzalo, the middle-aged
man who tries to dress and act as if he were twenty years younger, and
Flora, whose ridiculous attire and exaggerated sentimentality have been
learnt directly from the American films that she loves to watch. And yet,
as the acts go by, other, more serious notes start to enter the play. For
one thing, when he finally discovers the truth of the joke, Gonzalo reveals
that he has spent his life deliberately dressing and acting young in order
to hide from Flora the fact that the years are passing them both by. This
sudden shift in tone from the burlesque to the tragicomic caused the
novelist Pérez de Ayala to comment that the work was 'una de las comedias
de costumbres más serias, más humanas y más cautivadoras de la reciente
dramaturgia humana',27 praise which helped to establish Arniches'
reputation as a 'serious' dramatist. Many commentators were also impressed
by the final speeches in the play where Marcelino, a secondary character,
not only criticises the actions of the "Guasa club" but also indicts the
'ambiente de envidia, de ocio, de miseria moral' of Provincial life and
indeed 'el espíritu de la raza, cruel, agresivo, burlón, que no ríe de su
propia alegría, sino del dolor ajeno'. These words, and Marcelino's claim
that the only remedy for this lamentable national situation is 'difundiendo
la cultura',28 serve to give the play a 'regenerationist' note similar to
that found in the works of Unamuno, Machado and others, authors who were
bitterly obsessed with the social and political stagnancy of Restoration
Spain.29

When Edgar Neville came to make his film version of La señorita de Trevélez
in 1936, he discovered that the play was too short and so decided, with
Arniches' approval, to amplify it.30 He therefore added a whole series of
slapstick scenes, reminiscent of Hollywood silent and 1930s comedies, and
made the original enredo even more complex by introducing the character of
Araceli, Galán's true love. But his most radical change is found just
before the climax to the film where Neville produces a dramatic reversal
which undermines the spectator's expectations every bit as much as the
original play had done. Neville's Flora, unlike Arniches', ultimately
discovers the truth behind the joke and, in a powerfully moving scene,
suddenly appears not in the ridiculous flowered clothes and make-up which
she had worn earlier but rather in the austere black which is expected of
an aging spinster. It is her character, therefore, and not Gonzalo, who is
forced to confront reality and who introduces a note of tragicomic pathos
into the film. In this way, Neville redirects the social criticism of
Arniches' work by making the feminist point that, in a society such as the
one shown in the film, women are the ultimate victims of men's schemes and
lies.

By contrasting Arniches' and Neville's La señorita de Trevélez with Calle
mayor, we can see more clearly how Bardem recuperates an earlier theatrical
and cinematic tradition and transmutes it into something both more
realistic and more tragic. First, and at the most basic level, Calle mayor
retains the central story-line of its predecessors, the film being built
around the joke played on the principal female character, Isabel, by the
male pranksters. And yet the film is far from being a comedy or a
tragicomedy since we are never invited to enjoy the enredo or to laugh with
or even at the activities of the gamberros. Right from the very first
moment that we see them together as a group, celebrating the intellectual's
reaction on receiving the coffin at his home, we are repulsed by their
grotesque laughter and behaviour. Bardem therefore shifts our attention
from the development of the joke - which is used simply to give the
story-line a sense of tragic inevitability - and focuses instead on the
implications and consequences of his characters' actions. Secondly, the
film, just like the two earlier works, makes full use of types. The four
main gamberros, Luis, Calvo, Luciano and the doctor, are not endowed with
any inner life but are rather portrayed through their stereotypically, and
even exaggeratedly, loutish behaviour, while Isabel's mother (played by
María Gámez, the actress who had portrayed Flora in Neville's film) and her
household maid (played by Matilde Muñoz Sampedro, Bardem's own mother and
star of the 1940s stage) could belong in any Spanish costumbrista or
popular drama. In this, they provide a striking contrast with the main
protagonists, Isabel, Juan and Federico, whose moral dilemmas are treated
with great depth and sensitivity.

But the main difference between the three versions lies in the prominent
role which Bardem gives to the social setting in Calle mayor. Arniches'
play and Neville's film take place in the local casino and in the Trevélez
household, although Neville does use a few location shots at the onset to
point to the wider context of his story. Bardem, however, as the very title
of his film implies, allows his Provincial town to become his main
protagonist. In doing this, he draws on another Spanish literary tradition,
'la estupenda tradición realista de nuestra novela' which he had spoken
about in his Salamanca talk. From this point of view, Calle mayor can be
seen to contain deliberate echoes of a whole series of Spanish novels, from
Galdós to Baroja. Chief amongst these is without doubt Clarín's La Regenta
(1884), Spain's greatest nineteenth-century novel of provincial life. From
the very beginning of his novel, Clarín is intent on providing the reader
with a clear idea of the personality of his fictional town, Vetusta, and
does so by carefully describing its different quarters in turn - the old
aristocratic centre, the new middle-class area to the northwest, and the
dirty working-class district further out -, each of which will have an
important role to play in the drama.31 In a similar fashion, Bardem too
carefully outlines the topography of his setting, his camera visiting the
bustling commercial area around the Calle Mayor, the older quarter from the
Cathedral to the brothel, and the new housing estate being built in the
outskirts. Both works also go out of their way to show their characters in
their "natural" setting - the men in the casino, the women in Church, the
whole town congregating for the daily paseo -, in a deliberate attempt to
call attention to the influence that social ambience has on character. In
this, Calle mayor is very much an heir to the deterministic view of life
which lies at the heart of La Regenta, and indeed of the realist and
naturalist novel in general, but, in its depiction of the stifling
atmosphere of Provincial Spain, it also directly recalls the novels of the
early twentieth-century regenerationist writers such as José Martínez Ruiz.
Both Calle mayor and Martínez Ruiz's La voluntad (1902) show how the
pettiness and conventionality of small-town life leads to the moral
destruction of their central characters and it is no coincidence that both
stories are told to the inescapable rhythm of the Cathedral bells.

Through drawing on this novelistic tradition, Calle mayor is able to turn
what had been a tragicomic sainete in the hands of Arniches and Neville
into a work of social or critical realism. And yet the film is not simply
an abstract social realist drama since, within its realist framework, there
is also a melodrama: the story of Isabel. Over the past few decades, there
has been a concerted effort on the part of film theorists to present
melodrama as a subject worthy of close academic attention, after centuries
during which it was treated dismissively as a sentimental, popular, or
"woman"'s genre.32 Critical to this development was an essay by Thomas
Elsaesser who, through a close study of the films of Hollywood director
Douglas Sirk, revealed clearly how melodrama could 'function either
subversively or as escapism'.33 Elsaesser's and later theorists' point is
that, by displacing social and ideological conflicts onto the private
sphere of individual or family relationships, melodrama can in fact either
diffuse those conflicts or call attention to them.34

In the case of Calle mayor, it is clear that Isabel's story has a
subversive function in the sense that it serves to reveal the effects that
social forces have on individual psychology. Isabel may be the victim of
the gamberros' cruel joke but she is also shown, in a more crucial sense,
to be the victim of the pressures placed upon her by her society.35 Such
pressures are clearly outlined in a key scene in which Isabel tells Juan
the story of her life, a story organised around the chorus 'Isabel, ¿no
tienes novio?' First it had been her girlfriends who had asked the question
out of malice, then her aunts through a desire to compare Isabel with their
own daughters, then her mother who was worried by the financial
consequences of Isabel's spinsterhood, and finally it was Isabel herself
who, shortly before meeting Juan, had come to the conclusion that she was a
failure. This scene helps to reveal how Isabel has internalised the demands
of her society, a society which, as the film graphically shows, has
confined her to certain roles and certain spaces: the Cathedral, where she
imbues the contradictory values of Catholic womanhood, the Calle Mayor,
where she is exposed to that most effective form of social control, gossip,
and, above all, the kitchen, corridors and bedroom of her home, that is,
the traditional spaces par excellence both of women and of melodrama.36 But
the film shows that there is another space available for women in this
society: the brothel. By introducing the character of Tonia, the local
prostitute whom we only ever see enclosed between the brothel's four walls,
Bardem is able to give the full measure of the plight of women in
contemporary society when he has her say of Isabel, towards the climax of
the film: 'Ella también espera... Aquí las mujeres no podemos hacer otra
cosa... Sólo esperar... En las esquinas, en los soportales de la Plaza,
paseando por la Calle Mayor, detrás de las ventanas... Siempre esperando al
hombre'.

Yet Isabel's melodrama has another function, one which is crucial to our
understanding of the central aim of the film which is to identify and
denounce a particular moment in Spain's history (the "aquí y ahora").
Isabel, like so many novelistic heroines before her, is a dreamer whose
illusions are fired, as in the case of Arniches' Flora, by Hollywood films.
In her first meeting with Juan, she had enthused over the gleaming new
kitchens which feature so prominently in American films and later, in the
key scene at the building site, she plans out her future home in ways
obviously borrowed from the movies she loves to watch. Hollywood films,
therefore, have provided her with a way of imagining another space which
Betsy Blair's character in Marty had also dreamed about: a home of her own.
But Isabel's dream also has another, far wider, significance for Bardem.
Over the years before the film was made, Franco's régime had gradually shed
its fascistic rhetoric in an attempt to cement the rapprochement with the
Western powers which had started with the onset of the Cold War, and also
modernised the economy which became less state-controlled and more
market-oriented.37 In a word, Spain was striving at this time to become a
capitalist country and in so doing, as Calle mayor shows, was attempting to
seduce the population with consumerist dreams like that of Isabel, fostered
by the foreign comedies and melodramas which were the main cinematic diet
of the Spanish people.38 Bardem, who has often attacked what he calls the
'cine falso [que] adormece al individuo',39 literally punctures such dreams
in the film by showing how Isabel almost falls down the deep hole which
will become the stairwell leading to her future flat.

Our full understanding of the true nature of this change taking place in
Franco's Spain, however, is secured by the presence in the film of
Federico, a character who has often been seen as Bardem's mouthpiece.
Federico is a writer from Madrid who works on the philosophical and
literary journal Ideas. He comes to the town in order to see his friend
Juan, shortly after the latter's transfer there, but also to encourage don
Tomás, a local intellectual who, as Bardem's original screenplay makes
clear, had once had a huge influence on Spain's youth,41 to collaborate on
the next issue of the journal. Don Tomás, however, who feels safe and
comfortable slumbering away in the Provincial town's casino, ultimately
refuses to write anything for Ideas. In response, Federico upbraids him in
one of the climactic scenes for what he calls his fear of the truth and his
cowardice. Don Tomás is no better than the gamberros themselves, says
Federico, for he too is unable or unwilling to see the reality that
surrounds him.

These meetings between Federico and don Tomás very much help to locate
Calle mayor in its precise historical context. The film portrays the
present moment of change and uncertainty in terms of a relationship between
generations. Franco's plan to modernise Spain's economy and thereby retain
his grip on the country and the Spanish people is shown to be bearing fruit
through the attitudes and activities of the gamberros. They represent the
vanguard of Franco's capitalist experiment, that is, the new professional
class which is gradually replacing the Falangist old guard in the running
of the country. In the original screenplay, Bardem underlined this fact by
including a scene in the bank where Juan works. As Federico watches how two
clerks convince a family of peasants to take out a loan, Juan boasts that
business has been going so well over the past years that the bank is
becoming the true owner of the whole town.42 This scene, through reasons of
censorship, was reduced to a casual remark at the beginning of the final
version of the film, but the point is still clearly made: the gamberros,
like Isabel with her longing for a new home, are fully participating in the
new capitalist dream offered them by the régime.

But these new Francoists do not represent the whole of the upcoming
generation in Spain. As Bardem was making his film, the country experienced
the first wave of serious unrest since the Civil War. The student rebellion
on the streets of Madrid in February 1956 led to the declaration of
Franco's first state of emergency and also, as we have seen, to Bardem's
own brief arrest.43 Bardem himself has underlined the generational
significance of these events by saying that Spain was suddenly faced with
'un nuevo frente de lucha antifranquista, frente al tradicional de la clase
obrera organizada. Son los estudiantes e intelectuales hijos de los
fundadores ideológicos del regimen'.44 In Calle mayor, it is without doubt
Federico who acts as a representative of this new 'frente de lucha'. And,
from this point of view, his visit to don Tomás could well be seen as an
attempt by the disaffected young to make contact with, and gain support
from, an older generation of intellectuals. In a sense, therefore, what
Federico is hoping to find in don Tomás is a vestige of the pre-Civil War
spirit of critical regenerationism, that is, the spirit which had led
Unamuno in En torno al casticismo (1895) to denounce the moral and
intellectual bankruptcy of the youth of his day,45 and Antonio Machado in
Campos de Castilla (1917) to sing a hymn of praise to the young Spain which
was being born amidst the corruption and ruins of the old.46 But the don
Tomás that Federico encounters is inert and resigned and is unable to
provide any support for the new generation. He therefore bears witness to
the tragic fact that the Civil War served to destroy a whole generation of
intellectuals, either through execution, exile or, in his own case,
enforced silence.47 The result of this has been a radical break in cultural
continuity which has left the youth of Spain alone and having to find their
own way forward in the world, their own path to truth.

In many ways, Federico's quest in Calle mayor can be seen to represent the
film's search for its own style. Calle mayor, like Federico, searches for a
connection with Spain's past, reaching back across the Civil War and making
contact with the work of the regenerationists and, beyond, with the realist
tradition of the nineteenth century. But, just as Federico finds don Tomás
wanting, so the film discovers that such literary traditions are not enough
to capture fully the reality of the present moment. They may provide leads
but they belong firmly to their own epochs, and filmmakers in the 1950s
need to find their own ways of portraying reality.48 This is a fact which
Bardem, once again, explores through the character of Federico.

The essential fact about Federico is that he is an outsider who stands
apart from the social forces and pressures at work in the town. But his
role in the film is to help the other characters - especially Juan and
Isabel - become outsiders too. This he does by taking a firm moral stance
and encouraging the others to do the same. As a result of his demand that
the truth be told, whatever the consequences, he forces Juan into a
situation in which he has no choice but to separate himself physically and
morally from the gamberros, and examine his conscience. Similarly, he
forces the truth upon Isabel at the end of the film and leaves her in a
position in which she is obliged to leave her illusions behind. Of course,
the film provides no happy ending and we are left with the image of a Juan
who has banished himself from the town and an Isabel entrapped behind her
rain-spattered window, but it at least implies that the final social
alienation of the characters is preferable to the moral alienation which
they had previously suffered.

Federico's rigid moral stance is also the stance of the film as a whole.49
Due to the threat of censorship, Calle mayor could not openly enunciate its
truths, so it aims instead to distance the spectator from what they are
watching, to turn them too into critical outsiders. This it does in several
ways. First, it offers them a film based on a fundamentally comic situation
and then proceeds to disorient them as much as Arniches' work had done by
showing that the gamberros' prank is anything but funny. Secondly, taking
advantage of the popular appeal of American films, it draws the spectator
in with the promise of a melodrama and then goes on to show that the
premise on which many contemporary Hollywood films are constructed, a
comfortable bourgeois life, is, at least in the Spanish context, nothing
more than a lie. Thirdly, it provides what seems to be a recognizably
realistic portrayal of provincial life but gradually defamiliarises what is
presented on screen. It does this through grotesque exaggeration, through
the use of foreign actors in some of the principal roles, especially Betsy
Blair whose facial expressions and bodily gestures are clearly foreign to a
Spanish audience, and, most importantly, through its unrelenting unmasking
of the profound moral and social degradation of the town. In short, Calle
mayor decides that it is not enough or (given the existence of censorship)
even possible simply to portray reality as classical realism had done; it
also needs to confront and upset the spectator's expectations and force
them to take up a critical position in relation to what they see. Only in
this way, only by creating a crise de conscience in his audience, could he
hope to distance them from the conformism of his gamberros and, as he once
put it, 'dirigir la mirada del espectador en otra dirección, hacia "lo
mejor"'.50

This is the essence of Bardem's new realism which could perhaps be called
(if any label is necessary) political or committed realism. Both Hopewell
and Kinder, while praising Calle mayor, seem to suggest that Bardem was
something of a peripheral figure in the creation of the New Spanish Cinema
of the late 1950s and early 1960s which, they claim, grew more out of
Berlanga's, Ferreri's and Fernán Gómez's reworking of the Spanish
esperpento tradition and Saura's contacts with the cinema of Buñuel and the
French nouvelle vague.51 There may be some truth in this. After completing
the trilogy of Muerte de un ciclista, Calle mayor and Los segadores (1957)
- which dealt with the social and moral problems of the haute bougeoisie,
middle classes and peasants respectively -, Bardem tended to make more
occasional pieces until the death of Franco when his ideological bias came
powerfully to the fore in openly Communist works such as El puente (1976).
And yet it must never be forgotten that, with Calle mayor, he produced a
film which not only directly addresses the question of the direction in
which Spanish cinema should go but also provides perhaps the most vivid
testimony to the complex historical and cultural moment of its making.

Notes

  1. See Juan Eugenio Julio de Abajo de Pablos, Mis charlas con J.A. Bardem
     (Valladolid: Quirón Ediciones, 1996), pp. 46-50.
  2. The letter appeared in Les Lettres Françaises (Paris) on 16 February
     1956.
  3. See Marcel Oms, 'J.A. Bardem', Premier Plan (Lyon), 21 (Feb. 1962),
     3-64 (p. 3)
  4. Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present (New
     York: Continuum, 1996), p. 34.
  5. ibid., Chapters 2, 3 and 4.
  6. André Bazin, 'Cabiria: The Voyage to the End of Neorealism'; in Bazin,
     What is Cinema? Volume II (Berkeley: University of California Press,
     1971), pp. 83-92 (p. 87).
  7. ibid., p. 86.
  8. Bondanella, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, p. 125.
  9. See, for example, 'J.A. Bardem', Film ideal (Madrid), 5 (February
     1957), 8-9 (p. 9).
 10. 'Tre domande a Bardem', Cinema Nuovo (Milan), 108 (June 1957), 328.
 11. J.M. García Escudero, 'Calle mayor', Film ideal, 5 (February 1957),
     29.
 12. Guido Aristarco, 'Calle mayor', Cinema Nuovo (Milan), 90-91 (1.10.56),
     145-8 and 191 (pp. 146-7).
 13. See, for example, Angel Alonso Dobz, 'Bardem: Puedo considerarme
     propiamente un realista', Cine cubano (Havana), 121 (1988), 53-9.
 14. For more details on this film week, see Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema
     (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 451-2.
 15. 'J.A. Bardem', Film ideal, 5 (febrero 1957), 8-9 (p. 8).
 16. J.A. Bardem, '¿Para qué sirve un film?', Cinema universitario, 3 (May
     1956); reproduced in J.A. Bardem (Madrid: Cuadernos de cine (UNAM) 4,
     1962), pp. 5-7 (pp. 6-7).
 17. 'J.A. Bardem', Film ideal, 5 (February 1957), 8-9 (p. 8).
 18. 'Entrevista con J.A. Bardem', Tiempo de cine (Buenos Aires), año 1,
     no: 5 (February-March 1961); reproduced in J.A. Bardem (Madrid:
     Cuadernos de cine (UNAM) 4, 1962), pp. 17-29 (p. 17).
 19. 'J.A. Bardem', Film ideal, 5 (February 1957), 8-9 (p. 8).
 20. Bardem's talk is reproduced in L.G. Egido, J.A. Bardem (Huelva:
     Festival de cine iberoamericano, 1983), pp. 50-2 (p. 50).
 21. For an overview of the Francoist films of this period, see John
     Hopewell, Out of the Past: Spanish Cinema after Franco (London: BFI
     Books, 1986), pp. 33-43.
 22. Egido, J.A. Bardem, pp. 50-1.
 23. ibid., p. 52.
 24. ibid., p. 50.
 25. 'Tre domande a Bardem', Cinema Nuovo, 108 (June 1957), 328.
 26. On the genealogy of the sainete, see Douglas R. McKay, Carlos Arniches
     (New York: Twayne Publishers Inc., 1972), pp. 28-47.
 27. Ramón Perez de Ayala, 'La señorita de Trevélez'; in Pérez de Ayala,
     Obras completas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1966), III, 321-6 (p. 323).
 28. Arniches, La señorita de Trevélez, Act III, Scene 8; in Carlos
     Arniches, El amigo Melquíades/La señorita de Trevélez, ed. M.Seco
     (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1994), pp. 200-01.
 29. For a regenerationist reading of Arniches' play, see José Monleón, El
     teatro del 98 frente a la sociedad española (Madrid: Cátedra, 1975),
     pp. 141-61.
 30. See Edgar Neville en el cine (Madrid: Filmoteca Nacional de España,
     1977), p. 17.
 31. See Clarín, La Regenta (Madrid: Alianza, 1981), pp. 15-21.
 32. For a history of melodrama criticism, see Christine Gledhill, 'The
     Melodramatic Field: An Investigation'; in ed. C. Gledhill, Home Is
     Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film (London:
     BFI Books, 1987), pp. 5-39.
 33. Thomas Elsaesser, 'Tales of Sound and Fury', Monogram, 4 (1972), 2-15;
     reproduced in ed. C. Gledhill, Home Is Where the Heart Is, pp. 43-69
     (p. 47).
 34. See, for example, Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres (Philadelphia:
     Temple University Press, 1981), p. 225. Kinder follows a similar line
     in her study of Bardem's use of melodrama in Muerte de un ciclista;
     see Kinder, Blood Cinema, p. 55.
 35. At the end of the film, Federico informs Isabel that the
     responsibility for her predicament lies with 'la ciudad, toda la
     ciudad'.
 36. On the role of the home in melodrama, see Elsaesser, 'Tales of Sound
     and Fury', loc. cit., pp. 61-2.
 37. For a brief overview of these changes, see Raymond Carr and Juan Pablo
     Fusi, Spain: Dictatorship to Democracy (London: George Allen & Unwin,
     1979), pp. 49-78. Bardem himself once said that, in the 1950s, he was
     making films in a capitalist, rather than a fascist, society (P.W.
     Evans, 'A Bardem Retrospective', Vida Hispánica, xxxvi, no: 3 (Autumn
     1987), 33-4 (p. 34)).
 38. Bardem and Berlanga's Bienvenido Mr Marshall (1952), as Hopewell (Out
     of the Past, pp. 48-50) has shown, had already made a similar point.
 39. Julián Conde, 'Entrevista con Bardem', Excélsior (Mexico City),
     18.1.59; reproduced in J.A. Bardem (Madrid: Cuadernos de cine (UNAM)
     4, 1962), pp. 9-14 (p. 11). The film itself openly attacks this 'cine
     falso' when Juan tells Isabel that Federico would consider the films
     she loves to be 'una mentira'.
 40. See, for example, C.F. Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo: Cine español
     1951-1961 (Valencia: Ediciones Documentos 5 Filmoteca, 1993), p. 341.
 41. J.A. Bardem, Calle mayor (guión original) (Madrid: Alma-Plot
     Ediciones, 1993), p. 8. Not surprisingly, this reference and the
     reference to the fact that the latest issue of Federico's magazine,
     which contained articles on Picasso and neorealism, had just been
     censored (ibid., p. 32), were suppressed by the censors in the final
     version of the film.
 42. ibid., pp. 104-06.
 43. On the students' rebellion, see Carr and Fusi, Spain: Dictatorship to
     Democracy, pp. 146-7.
 44. de Abajo de Pablos, Mis charlas con J.A. Bardem, p. 47.
 45. See above all the work's final chapter, entitled 'Sobre el marasmo
     actual de España'; in Miguel de Unamuno, Obras completas (Madrid:
     Escelicer, 1969), I, 856-69. In this context, it is perhaps no
     coincidence that, in the original screenplay, Bardem had given his
     intellectual the name of don Miguel.
 46. In the original screenplay, Federico's impassioned defence of the
     young Spain which is trying desperately to come to life, the 'otra
     ciudad que vive, que pugna por salir, que - saldrá' (Bardem, Calle
     mayor (guión original), p. 126), is directly and deliberately
     reminiscent of Machado's poem 'El mañana efímero'; see Antonio
     Machado, Poesías completas (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1990), pp. 232-3.
 47. In this, he is very much a forerunner of the Fernando figure in
     Erice's El espíritu de la colmena (1973).
 48. In his Salamanca talk, Bardem claimed that contemporary Spanish
     filmmakers were alone due to the fact that the intellectuals had never
     shown any interest in, or support for, their country's cinema (Egido,
     J.A. Bardem, p. 51). Federico's attack on don Tomás' 'cowardice'
     should also perhaps be read in this context.
 49. Bardem once claimed that 'ese intelectual que meto en mis películas
     [...] lo hago para no engañar, para que las entiendan' (Bardem,
     'Declaraciones', Nuestro cine, no: 29; reproduced in J.A. Bardem (La
     Coruña: VI Certamen internacional de cine de humor, 1978), p. 10).
 50. J.A. Bardem, 'Para qué sirve un film?'; reproduced in J.A. Bardem
     (Madrid: Cuadernos de cine (UNAM) 4, 1962), p. 6.
 51. Hopewell, Out of the Past, pp. 58-63, 71-6 and 134-6; Kinder, Blood
     Cinema, pp. 87-126.

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The author

Stephen Roberts is Lecturer in the Department of Hispanic and Latin
American Studies, School of Modern Languages, at the University of
Nottingham.