Alfred Hitchcok lapidately defined cinema for Truffaut as the art of creating emotions, and the filmmaker’s mission is to maintain them. For Hitchcock there was no more life to think, write and direct movies. He sacrificed everything to live in that world. Truffaut escaped from an uprooted childhood and turbulent adolescence a voyou de Pigalle, thanks to the passion that watching and commenting on movies produced in him along with the benevolent and paternal tutelage of André Bazin.
I was lucky, thanks to the friendly intermediation of Miguel Rubio, to meet and deal with François Truffaut, whose human warmth went to a certain initial reserve due to his idea that a new friendship forced him to discard another. Truffaut remembered, he lived the cinema, his curiosity, without genres, ages or countries, made him go from Sacha Guitry to Hitch, from Cocteau to Rossellini, from Bergman to Lubitsch, with no more rules than that emotion for the images of which he spoke Sir Alfred.
Ever since I met José Luis Garci, and that is how I have written it, I have related him to the Truffaut model: passion for cinema and literature, apostolate to speak and talk about films, deep autobiographical wound in his films and writings, extraordinary generosity without fee to enjoy life, recognize talents and cultivate friendships. Possibly before later someone insists that Garci write his autobiography; vain attempt, because anyone who traces the humus of his films and reads his books will have a strictly Garci vision, that is, emotional and evocative of the pillars of his life.
Bad and undervalued movies, a provocative title where they exist and a brand of the house, is in my opinion one of his best books, along with Insert Coin, his volume of short stories (Reino de Cordelia) and Beber de cine (Nickleodeon. Notorious Ediciones ) his unforgettable tour of the map, very personal, of cocktails and movies. Like almost all of Garci’s books, it is a miraculous mixture of autobiography filled with emotional memories of all kinds and a stimulating panoply of films, actors, actresses … that in his opinion have been underestimated, but in which the writer unravels the keys; sometimes the transience of a memory or the company with which he saw the film, sometimes the director, a shot, a sequence or an unjust punishment of the cinematographic genre, such as the peplums, to whose claim he dedicates a meaningful chapter, La conquest of Atlantis, dedicated ad honorem to Luis Alberto de Cuenca, another conspicuous defender of the genre, with a quote from Pindar included, full of reflections, evocations and a list of films whose titles will take many readers back to afternoons of double programs and dreams of everything. type. In these pages, among others, Vittorio Cottafavi appears, a name that just now will say something but that, along with memories of encounters with the filmmaker, Garci sketches an intelligent and vindictive portrait of a very personal and creative filmmaker, as if they dare to look at the stills of The Conquest of Atlantis, and especially The Hundred Knights, will be able to see the emotional and elegant compass with which our writer navigates.
What causes this cascade of titles and characters is the urgent need to see those films and get to know better those characters drawn by Garci, sometimes in an impressionistic way, sometimes anecdotally, but always with a certainly irresistible pull of intrigue. The book, after a very tasty prologue, opens with a chapter dedicated to Infinite Panic. I see, even in my most cinematic readers, a rictus of inevitable strangeness. “I saw her the day she was 19 years old. On January 20, 1963. At the Fantasio cinema, just released ”. In this precise, clear, direct to the point of memories, Proustian like the entire book, this review begins. She shared that movie with M: “She was brunette, slim and nice. She looked like Natalie Wood. He had quick, greenish eyes that almost closed when he laughed, like in cartoons: two little lines. She used to wear mint-scented scarves around her neck. ” AM the movies did not suit him much and he preferred to go for a drink at the Bowling Stadium, on the ground floor of the Benlliure cinema. But going back to Infinite Panic, Garci is interested, in the thread of his afternoons with M, talking about Ray Milland, a good actor and a director whom Garci met during a filming in Madrid, as interesting as unknown, with a western, which Garci highlights, A man alone, sober, dry, very anti-Maccarthy. Ah, by the way, following his Oscar, Garci received a postcard from Australia in which M said to him after sending him a kiss: “You know? I am no longer pretty by night or by day ”.
Do you know or remember Jan Sterling, Kirk’s girl in The Big Carnival, the one who didn’t kneel in church because she didn’t spoil her stockings? You know what happened to Suzy Parker, rampaging through Gary Cooper’s life at 10 Frederick Street? Or Fortunio Bonanova, a Spanish actor who appears in a thousand Hollywood casts and when he returned to Spain no one wanted to hire him. More than one of my readers will agree with Garci, and with me, that Cary Grant, who never won an Oscar and was only nominated once, is one of the greatest, like Edward G. Robinson, Joel McCrea, Margaret Sullavan, who it drove men crazy and stars like Jim Stewart and Hank Fonda, or Myrna Loy, as elegant as it was sensual. Or they can discover Gordon, Gordy for close friends, Douglas, a first-rate director, especially in noirs and westerns like El detective or Chuka or a movie with the despised Alan Ladd inside, Los insatiables, mutilated in its Spanish premiere. The list of findings and claims of this first segment of the book, sarcastically titled “Bad Movies”, I leave for the reader who ventures into its pages.
The second segment, entitled “River of no return”, is preceded by a tasty and wonderful warning for sailors, and then an encyclopedic and deliberately disorderly succession of films, directors, actors, actresses with the demanded pedigree of despised, forgotten / as or denigrated. From that genius that was Harry D’Abbadie D’Arrast, well appreciated by Chaplin and who worked in Spain, to Black Amazons, Harry Carey, Last Train to Katanga, which fascinates him, Leap to Glory, by maestro León Klimowsky, or the mystery that has always shrouded why the leader allowed that masterpiece that is The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes to be massacred. A Cast of Thousand, as Anita Loos titled one of her memoir books. Venturing down that frantic and non-judgmental carousel that is this river of no return designed as albur, but with a pole star that is the passion for cinema, is a fascinating journey without tolls or prejudices.
And last but not least, the book closes with a very Garci predilection, and that some of his friends despair when he entrusts them to us, due to the injustices and endless sacrifices they cause, which are the lists. They will enjoy and disagree with their ten favorite films by their favorite directors and after a wide miscellany of classifying objects, Films d’auteur, Very special, musicals, boxing, science fiction, trials, peplum, with a better ending and … well … some (formal) girlfriends who got laid and their late loves, that I don’t keep awake because I’m very respectful of the privacy of my friends, so let them tell it.
PS Maybe they think the book ends here. Big mistake. As its editors, Guillermo Balmori and Enrique Alegrete know very well, congratulations, friends for this new Garciana edition, the director of El abuelo loves to subtitle the photographs of his books, and I recommend that you read and enjoy the back cover and how José Luis Garci joins a photo taken at his school, on a Saturday in March 1954, with the movies he saw that day at the San Miguel cinema. Life, images, cinema, memories.
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