The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz(Mexico, 1955) 89 min B&W DIR: Luis Buñuel. PROD: Alfonso Patiño Gómez. SCR: Luis Buñuel, Eduardo Ugarte, Rodolfo Usigli. MUSIC: Jorge Pérez Herrera. DOP: Agustín Jiménez. CAST: “Miroslava” (aka Miroslava Stern), Ernesto Alonso, Rita Macedo, Ariadna Welter, Andrea Palma, Rodolfo Landa, José María Linares-Rivas, Leonor Llausás. (Alianza Cinematográfica)
Pairing his adaptation of Wuthering Heights with The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, one glimpses Buñuel’s possibilities as a horror film director. (Although in his would-be Hollywood days, he had an indirect influence on the making of The Beast with Five Fingers).
Arguably, Archibaldo is the most visually interesting of Buñuel’s films. His films are often referred to as “dreamlike”, rather in content than form, as surreal moments are portrayed as “matter of fact” as anything in the real world. However, in Archibaldo, Buñuel greatly uses mise en scene to create an unnatural world. With innovative lighting and optical effects, we are made to feel what it is like in the brain of the “protagonist”.
Despite the murder, suicide and bloodshed, this film, believe it or not, is actually a comedy, however subtle. A common joke in Buñuel’s films is that people’s simple desires are often frustrated by ridiculous or unnatural circumstances. In this dark farce, Archibaldo de la Cruz is a killer who can’t kill anyone! His sadistic attempts at killing women are always thwarted by the most unpredictable twists.
In a bizarre opening, Archibaldo as a child begins a fixation with a music box given him by his mother just moments before she is killed by a stray bullet from a Fascist revolution! It is pop-Freudian psychology at its most perverse, as his attempt to kill women stems not only from that musical prop, but from the absent mother figure. In fact, a strange dreamlike image of his dead mother appears just before one of his murder attempts.
This strange childhood story is related to a nurse in a Catholic hospice. In De Sade-ian fashion, he asks the nurse if she believes that death would be wonderful because she would be in the hereafter. When she says “yes”, Cruz grabs a razor and lurches towards to kill her! However, as she runs away she falls out the window to her death.
The key sequences in Archibaldo proceed much like this. Next on his list is a woman who recovers from a car accident (in a weird, obviously stagebound, segment replete with styrofoam bricks around the shell of the automobile), but she ends up being killed by her pimp. In one gratuitous scene, we see Cruz shooting and killing a little tart on their wedding day… then we see he imagined the whole sequence. This is a very black carbon copy of a sequence in Preston Sturges’ Unfaithfully Yours, in which the elaborate imagined plot to kill his bride is followed by a bungled execution. On the day in which Cruz is to wed this woman, and before he can enact his crime, she is suddenly shot dead by a jealous lover! Then there is the ravishing Lavinia (Miroslava Stern, simply billed as Miroslava), who bears an uncanny resemblance to a store mannequin, which Cruz brings home out of perverse adulation. He invites the girl over to show her the wax clone of herself, and is just about to strangle her, when suddenly about a dozen visitors arrive! Frustrated, he later incinerates the wax dummy– a surrogate for Lavinia’s intended fate.
In the climax of the film, we see that Cruz has related all of this to an incredulous police chief. Much to Cruz’s dismay, the police chief says he cannot charge him- if he had to arrest everybody who simply wanted to kill somebody, the entire world would be in jail. Cruz is a frustrated sadist and a frustrated masochist: he can’t even get punished! With this tongue-in-cheek sequence, we see the surprising complexity of the deceptively simple narrative. Its flashbacks within flashbacks foreshadow the director’s more accomplished experimentations in labyrinthine narrative (such as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie). As in El, the film ends with ambiguity, as we see the hero walking arm in arm into the background with Lavinia– supposedly purged of his madness. It is a weird Chaplin-esque moment, as we are uncertain if Cruz will find happiness… especially with this gold-digging girl.
Tragically, Miroslava Stern, born in Czechoslovakia yet made a career in Mexican films, died from suicide shortly after completion of this film, aged 29. The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz had a North American video release by Water Bearer Films, and could surely benefit from a DVD-Blu-ray restoration that would enhance its deserved reputation.