Although there is no doubt that "El esqueleto de la señora Morales" is a cult film, it caused no big impression in 1960. The style was too conventional, but there is a playful fluctuation between extremes that moves the story, and makes the film an attractive, enjoyable and enduring production. It is —above anything else— the work of Spanish scriptwriter Luis Alcoriza, who wrote without his usual collaborators (his Austrian wife Janet Riesenfeld, or Spanish Luis Buñuel), in a more direct relation with "Mexicanity", in contrast to Buñuel, who favored everything French, although a few of his best works were about the Mexican cultural being, from Alcoriza's scripts, as "Los olvidados", and "Él". However there is nothing in Alcoriza's filmography as "The Skeleton of Mrs. Morales". The source is an attractive tale told in first person, by Welsh author Arthur Machen, who introduced the search of the Holy Grail in contemporary British literature, and influenced the works of Lovecraft and other authors of the macabre. "The Islington Mystery" (1927) is not a horror tale. It is a direct narration about imperfect crimes, a duel between certainty and probability with a few characters, in which the protagonist Harold Boale does get away with murder, as he sails to the New World and finds a young Swedish wife after killing his detestable wife, a Mrs. Boale who is hardly alive for more than two sentences, giving way to her sister as the leading feminine character: Mary Aspinall, a nurse who is suspicious of the reasons Harold gives to explain why his wife is missing. There is also a medicine student in the plot, who buys a skeleton with a deformed leg and presents it as "evidence" to the police, which leads to Boale's trial, the part of the tale I enjoyed the most, led by a brilliant defense attorney. In Alcoriza's adaptation —more sardonic and moralizing than Machen's tale—, Pablo Morales (Arturo de Córdova) exhibits his wife's skeleton in his shop window, goes through a similar trial as Boale, but has a different ending. The atmosphere of I World War, which in Machen's tale distracts from clumsy crimes and unresolved disappearances, is turned into the fears of Mexican middle class, and the repression of the Catholic church. Morales enjoys a few little pleasures in life: a photographic camera, occasional talks with his friends at the local bar, and, first of all, his work as taxidermist. His wife, a good looking woman with a deformed leg and lameness, is his enemy, rejects his sexual advances, and is allied to the local priest. Morales tries to deal with his sexual urges because —as a rare bird inside the Catholic universe, and unfortunately for him— he is faithful. In spite of his skillful tasks and a few defensible titles (especially comedies), the filmography of director Rogelio A. González has nothing comparable to "El esqueleto de la señora Morales". On the other hand, the film triggered Alcoriza's career, perhaps because he could have made a better job. The following year, he directed his first film, followed by remarkable titles as "Tlayucán", "Tiburoneros", and "Tarahumara".
Review of Skeleton of Mrs. Morales
