I don't know who made up the dumb title for this pretty good movie but I suspect it was the head of the studio, Herbert J. Yates, known far and wide for his lack of taste. "The Bullfighter and the Lady." He wanted to change the title of John Ford's "The Quiet Man" to "The Prizefighter and the Colleen." He insisted on inserting his wife, Vera Ralston, into movies that were generally so poor that her presence served as small detraction.
In this film, directed by Budd Boetticher, torero Manolo (Gilbert Roland) wants to learn how to shoot skeet from American Johnny Regan (Robert Stack). In return, Manolo agrees to teach Regan the fundamentals of bullfighting. Regan turns out to have aficion, and he learns fast. He also gets mixed up with Joy Page as a local senorita, and he finds himself in culture shock, all mixed up by Latin conceptions of masculine honor and politesse. Showing off in the arena, he is responsible for Manolo's painful death by bull horn, but manages to redeem himself later with a particularly skilled performance, and then retires permanently, with Joy Page beside him.
Of all the bullfighting movies out there, this is the most didactic. Not that it places too many demands on the viewer, but at least you DO get to know that a veronica is the simplest possible pass. Well, we should learn something about the art -- or the sport, or whatever it is. Boetticher himself was a professional torero. In some ways, he was in real life at least as interesting as any of his actors. He always worked with a small budget and, at one point during the 1970s, found himself in Mexico trying to do a documentary on a famous torero while completely broke. As he put it, it's one thing to sleep in your car and live off roadside burritos when you're 21, but it's quite another to try it in your 40s.
Robert Stack isn't bad as the protagonist. In some of the shots, I could swear it was Stack himself doing the passes, rather than a stunt double in a blond wig. Of course this wasn't with a full-grown bull, just a young one. No more than about 500 pounds of bone and muscle. The bulls in the corridas reach about 480 kilograms, which, if my pocket calculator is correct, is half a ton. Who needs it? Stack, though, is not an expressive actor, exactly. With his blond hair and bleached eyebrows his features assume some of the properties of polished chromium. He performs at his best when looking intense, because his eyes slightly bulge. When he laughs, it's clear that he's enacting a role in a movie. Yet, he was an interesting guy too, born in Tokyo, trained in French. He's surprisingly muscular in a Turkish bath, with the build of an archer, a tiny waist, broad shoulders, and major pectorals on his shaved chest. And when he shows Manolo how to shoot skeet, he knows what he's talking about. He was first an actor, but after that came skeet at a competitive level.
Gilbert Roland had been around Hollywood too long, had played too many Latin sidekicks, to take any of this very seriously. He breezes through the part, and it comes as a kind of relief.
I happen to know a good deal about bullfighting because I have some experience, although, granted, they didn't have many bulls in Newark when I was a kid. In the hinterlands of Mexico, I once spotted a bull (or a steer or cow, some kind of bovine, anyway) in a corral, pulled my car over, hopped the fence, and to amuse my girl friend I began waving my jacket at the animal, calling, "Eh HEH, Toro," and all that. It rather surprised me when the beast noticed and began ambling towards me. I left -- pronto. It made me wonder just exactly why any purportedly sane human being would get into a ring with a half-ton bull, tease it, and then kill it. And none of that "art" stuff either. You want art, you can paint a picture of a bull's head on black velvet. All you can lose is the cost of the velvet and the paint that went on it.
In this film, directed by Budd Boetticher, torero Manolo (Gilbert Roland) wants to learn how to shoot skeet from American Johnny Regan (Robert Stack). In return, Manolo agrees to teach Regan the fundamentals of bullfighting. Regan turns out to have aficion, and he learns fast. He also gets mixed up with Joy Page as a local senorita, and he finds himself in culture shock, all mixed up by Latin conceptions of masculine honor and politesse. Showing off in the arena, he is responsible for Manolo's painful death by bull horn, but manages to redeem himself later with a particularly skilled performance, and then retires permanently, with Joy Page beside him.
Of all the bullfighting movies out there, this is the most didactic. Not that it places too many demands on the viewer, but at least you DO get to know that a veronica is the simplest possible pass. Well, we should learn something about the art -- or the sport, or whatever it is. Boetticher himself was a professional torero. In some ways, he was in real life at least as interesting as any of his actors. He always worked with a small budget and, at one point during the 1970s, found himself in Mexico trying to do a documentary on a famous torero while completely broke. As he put it, it's one thing to sleep in your car and live off roadside burritos when you're 21, but it's quite another to try it in your 40s.
Robert Stack isn't bad as the protagonist. In some of the shots, I could swear it was Stack himself doing the passes, rather than a stunt double in a blond wig. Of course this wasn't with a full-grown bull, just a young one. No more than about 500 pounds of bone and muscle. The bulls in the corridas reach about 480 kilograms, which, if my pocket calculator is correct, is half a ton. Who needs it? Stack, though, is not an expressive actor, exactly. With his blond hair and bleached eyebrows his features assume some of the properties of polished chromium. He performs at his best when looking intense, because his eyes slightly bulge. When he laughs, it's clear that he's enacting a role in a movie. Yet, he was an interesting guy too, born in Tokyo, trained in French. He's surprisingly muscular in a Turkish bath, with the build of an archer, a tiny waist, broad shoulders, and major pectorals on his shaved chest. And when he shows Manolo how to shoot skeet, he knows what he's talking about. He was first an actor, but after that came skeet at a competitive level.
Gilbert Roland had been around Hollywood too long, had played too many Latin sidekicks, to take any of this very seriously. He breezes through the part, and it comes as a kind of relief.
I happen to know a good deal about bullfighting because I have some experience, although, granted, they didn't have many bulls in Newark when I was a kid. In the hinterlands of Mexico, I once spotted a bull (or a steer or cow, some kind of bovine, anyway) in a corral, pulled my car over, hopped the fence, and to amuse my girl friend I began waving my jacket at the animal, calling, "Eh HEH, Toro," and all that. It rather surprised me when the beast noticed and began ambling towards me. I left -- pronto. It made me wonder just exactly why any purportedly sane human being would get into a ring with a half-ton bull, tease it, and then kill it. And none of that "art" stuff either. You want art, you can paint a picture of a bull's head on black velvet. All you can lose is the cost of the velvet and the paint that went on it.