Reviews

Here you have and old-fashioned melodrama beautifully scripted and directed. It was made in 20 days by Luis Saslavsky in the old studios of Argentina Sono Film, in January 1941. There's the not very conventional triangle -the outcast coming back to the little town of his youth, his one time and now very married girlfriend and her mean husband-. Deep down the plot it's a story against prejudice in a small Latin American town at the beginning of the 40's with good performances by Pedro López Lagar, Sabina Olmos and Santiago Arrieta. To these three, another one must be added: Sebastián Chiola as the supposedly stern business inspector, who in fact is a poker player addict. The flashback is the core of the film and the vision of the trees from the very young girl who once thought of becoming Hugo Morel's wife is shot with gusto by Saslavsky. The director claimed he didn't have any influences but it's apparent he was keen on French cinema. All in all, something to watch and to study. Something else: Saslavsky directed a remake in Spain in 1965 but it's not so good.

Even when biographies have always been a general disaster, this one made for TV seems to capture the right decade -the 20's-. What's more: Jason Miller as F. Scott Fitzgerald captures the essence of this peculiar author. In reference to Tuesday Weld, an actress not always understood, her loony portrait of the unfortunate Zelda Sayre is really frightening. You have to watch her dancing alone while you listen "Poor Butterfly" on the soundtrack. Much has been written about Ms Sayre and she herself wrote a beautiful novel -SAVE ME THE WALTZ-. But oddly enough, no actress could match her madness as Tuesday Weld did in that made-for-TV movie. Pity this segment of two tortured lives, very well directed, didn't reach a wider audience. No matter what, it's impossible to forget Ms Weld in front of the mirrors because she becomes Zelda Sayre, lost in her own world. abel posadas

Billy Wilder and Charles Bracket got the definite ghost story about Hollywood broken dreams. There's something vicious about the place and, on the other hand, this movie means the end of an era: Hollywood up to 1950. That year means, in my opinion, the last curtain for the so-called dream factory. And in that dream Norma Desmond and Joe Gillis become crazy. She becomes a fiend and he a pimp. The horror is that after 1950 Hollywood would never be the same and we can say that it's the end of the modern era and the beginning of postmodernism -what with the idiocy of the 50's era-? ABEL POSADAS