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Prose is not interior decoration but architecture, says Hemingway, the ornamentation of Blood and Sand is here scraped off for all the stark tension and grace underneath. Budd Boetticher goes to Mexico and finds in the corrida the meridian shape for all his superb later Westerns, the arena abstraction where heroism is cultivated, tested, transcended: "This is the circle of concrete that surrounds death... And these are the men who play with death." The gringo (Robert Stack) is callow, impatient, a show-off in a foreign culture; the mature bullfighter (Gilbert Roland), courtly and serene, understands not just the rules of the game, but its risky elegance as well. The road to spiritual "stature" is divided along pupil and mentor lines until Stack is forced to flesh out lessons of nobility and sacrifice before a colosseum of spectators and a pair of charging horns. Roland’s wry advice rings in his ears: "Try to acquire some of our fatalism, uh?" Pounding across the white sands of the screen, the bulls are seething, primeval forces to be contrasted with the matador’s own controlled brutality -- a soupçon of slow-mo gives the documentary-style cape undulations just the right hint of ritualized dance (cf. Deren’s Meditation on Violence). The lady, meanwhile, gazes down from the bleachers like a Frida Kahlo portrait, quietly regarding masculine honor if she’s Joy Page or, if she’s Katy Jurado, seizing the sword and exalting it herself. Boetticher allows himself one or two low-angled Figueroa skies, but his striking, deeply personal tale of athletes and aesthetes mostly shares Roland’s distaste for "fanciness," coolly yet ruthlessly burrowing into characters caught between fury and art as they purify themselves. The final ascending camera movement rests on the iconic statue of the bullfighter; in The Magnificent Matador Boetticher paints over that statue to cover the cracks, in Arruza he painfully glues its pieces back together. With Virginia Grey, John Hubbard, Antonio Gomez, Rodolfo Acosta, and Paul Fix. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |