Hiding as ‘Robert Rich,’ BlackListed scripter Dalton Trumbo won a stealth Best Story Oscar® (over the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and UMBERTO D.’s Cesare Zavattini!) for this sentimental treacle, a boy-and-his-dog story with a cow subbing for the dog. Yikes! Handsomely shot in Mexico, we see the cow grow into an arena-worthy bull fit for slaughter, but not before a lot of back-and-forth social-class struggle between el patrone and the boy’s poor landworking family. Stunningly lensed in hyper-realistic/ultra-saturated TechniColor & CinemaScope by Jack Hilyard, the South-of-the-Border verisimilitude compromised by English dialogue (a perfectly acceptable convention) and a lead kid with a cultured British uppercrust accent & big blue eyes (perhaps less acceptable). But suddenly, in the third act, everything comes into thrilling focus as the pic shifts from rural pastorale to urban verities and Death In The Afternoon as the boy (having aged maybe a month or two in four years) tries to roust up a presidential pardon for his beloved bull with visits to a series of magnificent palaces & government buildings before returning to the ring to witness the fatal blow. The sweep and grandeur of these last three reels (playing out like a modern silent film much as the first act of THE BLACK STALLION/’79 does) presumably handled not by director Irving Rapper (we’re way out of his fach*), but by some unnamed second-unit crew. Tremendous stuff, the bullfighting some of the best ever captured which makes an otherwise natural family picture a difficult watch . . . for kids or grownups. (Even with much of the worst hidden.) The pic cumulatively emotional; downright weird.
DOUBLE-BILL: *More bullfighting, well, faux bullfighting, in Rapper’s next, MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR/’58, with comedian Ed Wynn kidding around until the parody takes a tragic turn.
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