¡Bienvenidos, americanos!

When I arrived in Spain, the worst period, the twenty years following the Civil War, had come to an end.  The country was no longer hermetically sealed to the outside world, the economic blockade which the Allies had imposed on Franco for having sided with the Germans had been removed and Spain had been accepted as a member of the United Nations, just two years earlier.  The Nazis were no longer the world’s enemy, and the Americans had several military bases in the country, as part of their cold war strategy against Soviet Russia. This was seen as being good for the economy, but it was also felt that the foreign influences had to be controlled, to protect the innocent people from corruption.  Franco’s image as a Fascist dictator had to be attenuated as much as possible without letting anarchy break loose.

To project this benign image, the regime sponsored hundreds of movies which exalted the old, traditional Spain, chaste and noble, full of hope and faith, many of which used singing child actors, as a symbol of purity and joy.  It was grotesque to see the 12-year old Joselito dressed up as a bullfighter with his face heavily painted, aping the smiles and gestures of an adult as he chortled his strident coplas and pasodobles, and the same went for the cloying, angelic features of Marisol with her catchy tunes.  In every film, too, there was a kindly priest who tried to make sense out of the dilemmas of pouting but pure-minded girls and ardent but sincere riders of Italian motor scooters such as Javier’s, but newer. 

But my friends at the Residencia made it their business to introduce me to more critical films which were also being made, albeit under considerable duress.  Rather than offering prettied-up stereotypes, they glaringly focused on the real human beings of the day, wrestling with their fates like flies on sticky paper and defending themselves with the only weapon at their disposal, what was called black humour.  In spite of Spain’s abject humiliation after the war, with most of its intellectuals killed or in exile, it was still the land of Lope de Vega and Cervantes, agonizing over the meaningless of life.

The directors followed the Italian neo-realist school of Federico Fellini and Vittorio da Sica, but the only film they made which stood alone as an original Spanish creation was Bienvenido Mister Marshall.  The people of a tiny Castilian town anxiously await the delegation which has been sent to implement the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of post-war Europe, each villager with his wildly different expectation of what the americanos will do, and give.

The befuddled Mayor has the town whitewashed and hung with flower pots because he believes that the visitors will like it better if it resembles an Andalucian village, and orders everyone to dress up in flat-brimmed hats and mantillas like cordobeses and sevillanos.  The priest has nightmares in which he is put on trial by godless invaders resembling science fiction Martians.  The school teacher imagines brutish cowboys desecrating his classical culture.  The common folk feverishly draw up lists of things to ask for, such as motorcycles and refrigerators.  

Finally the great day comes, the balconies on the main street are jammed with people singing the welcome song they have composed for the occasion, which begins exuberantly with the cry ¡Americanos!   A motorcade appears in the distance in a cloud of dust, and a fleet of long black cars rumbles through the town... without stopping or even slowing down.  With gaping mouths and sagging flags, the villagers realize that they have been deceived.

The political message was implicit, with the once-proud Spaniards reduced to the state of beggars hoping for a handout from the triumphant Yankees, but the story itself was so much fun, with its caricature of the eccentrics one finds in any such village, that the censor didn’t even bother to alter it.

But most of the other efforts received corrections. Since the moral of every story comes at the end, the censor would force the filmmakers to save their unsuitable endings for the exported version and make a milder one for Spanish audiences. 

One such was El cochecito, “the little car”, about an old man who meets his cronies every day in the neighbourhood park.  They have to walk with canes and crutches, so their middle-class families get together to provide them with motorized wheelchairs.

But the hero still walks without difficulty, so his family refuses to make the same expenditure.  Reduced to seeing his friends putting off down the avenue and leaving him alone, he tries to force his son and daughter-in-law to accede to his desire.  Infuriated by their stubborn refusal, he dumps a bag of rat poison in the soup they are going to have for lunch.  The last scene shows them and their children being carried out of the building on stretchers and loaded into ambulances.

That was the uncensored version, which I later had the chance to see in Paris.  In the version Spanish audiences were shown, the old man regrets having put the poison in the soup before it gets to the table, and confesses to his crime just as the family is about to begin eating.  The last scene has him being taken away in a straitjacket to an insane asylum – a relatively happy ending.

 xxx