FIESTA

Just appeared on the Spanish video market and without having been seen previously in the Spanish cinemas, a very good SCW French film called "Fiesta", based on Jose Luis Villalonga biography. The film was selected for the Venice Festival. I saw it yesterday with two other friends after a "Crossfire" SCW game, all enjoying both game and film (husbands are free in August meanwhile family is outside Madrid!).

The Main role is played by the well known French actor Jean L. Trigtignant as a vicious (morphine addict, homosexual, cynical) nationalist colonel, but with the brightest and more vitriolic dialogues I've ever heard in a "war" film. Villalonga's story, is about a 17 year old Spanish aristocrat ( Villalonga was a well known aristocrat "play boy" during Franco's dictatorship, living in France and Spain), son of an Africanist cavalry colonel, who goes at his father's request from a French catholic school to Nationalist HQ in Mondragon (in Basque country) during the 1936 advance of the nationalist forces.

Due to Villalonga's youth, the father asks the Colonel (Trigtignant) to toughen the kid assigning him to a execution squad. The selected executions made in a convent cloister by the squad full of cognac, in front of formal guests from the local authorities and abroad fascists (among them a British ambulance driver woman, also a real character) are terrific and authentic, meanwhile the falangist shoot people at the cemetery walls. The bloodbath on the cloister walls resemble the bullfight and an officer mentions is the national "Fiesta."

The execution of a Basque nationalist priest and later the decision to shoot a 15 year old girl, daughter of a republican leader, are too hard situations that finally take Villalonga to the front as Alferez Provisional.

The film captures very well the atmosphere of the war - full of passions and absurd, lots of perfectly documented uniforms, and many "extras" (lots of soldiers around). Some of the characters as the army chaplain with belts and pistol hitting prisoners not willing to confess their sins, the aide de camp officer and lover of the Colonel, or the Basque priest (who looked exactly like Peter O'Toole are great. So I recommend it, specially if you can understand the dialogues which are splendid! Another good SCW film to increase the huge SCW filmography.

DURRUTI EN LA REVOLUCION ESPANOLA

Is the video version of the Abel Paz book of the same title, published by Fundacion Anselmo Lorenzo (CNT), it mixes photographs and descriptions of the mans life with propaganda.

The most interesting parts of the film are pieces from the original CNT 1936/9 films depicting the advance of the Durutti column, cars, tucks and many buses! Some combat sequences from the "La Batalla de Farlete" and "La Conquista del Carrascal de Chimillas" and "Los Aguiluchos de la FAI" . It would have been desirable that the fundacion had published the original films ( as they own lots of original master copies from the 36-39 period ) as some have a high military interest.