The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz review
a cheaply made one macabre joke movie that was only slightly amusing and
only somewhat more effective as satire.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
A black comedy about an upper-class gentleman would-be murderer,
who is always thwarted before the crime. It’s the last film of Luis Buñuel’s
(”Nazarin”/”The Exterminating Angel”/”Él”) Mexican period and though
minor it still has a few witty bizarre touches and some great imagery to
hang its hat on (a toy music box that supposedly can kill, a wax mannequin
of our hero’s girlfriend Lavinia (Miroslava Stern) that goes up in smoke
after our hero fails to murder his spiteful loved one he puts on a pedestal,
and the mirror in a room, acting as a look into our hero’s soul, reflecting
his unfaithful bride Carlota’s rendezvous with her suave married lover
Alejandro).
The wealthy, well-bred pottery craftsman, Archibaldo de la Cruz (Ernesto
Alonsa), tells the chief of police about all his intentions to kill women
that were thwarted. He reminisces when as a child of five, in Mexico City,
to soothe the bratty child his pretty governess (Leonor Llansas) concocted
a tall story about a king who had the same music box like the one in his
house that has the power to kill his enemies. It was the night of the revolution
and his governess was killed by a stray bullet after the spoiled child
played the music box and as a test of the music box’s powers wished for
her death. This incident, whereby he remembers her skirt flying upward
to reveal her bare legs, left him traumatized for life with a sense that
killing is a pleasing sexual thing. As an adult, Archibaldo accidently
finds and buys the same music box in a shop (during the revolution his
house was ransacked). This brings on an urge for him to kill women. The
attempts made on his hospital nurse Sister Trinidad (Chabela
Durán), the upward striving innocent Carlota (Ariadna
Welter), the fickle kept society woman temptress Patricia (Rita
Macedo) and the untruthful model Lavinia, provide some room for
Buñuel to poke fun at his machismo hero while having some fun by
also turning the suspense genre on its heels by reducing it to a tale of
sexual politics.
Buñuel has some laughs at the expense of the decadent hypocritical
bourgeoisie, dumb Yankee tourists, the complacent priests, the capricious
artist and at the Latin male lover image, while including his obsession
with foot fetishism. It never amounts to more than a cheaply made one macabre
joke movie that was only slightly amusing and only somewhat more effective
as satire, but it paved the way for his later more productive period of
creating many masterpieces.