Word: matador
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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While faithfully retelling the story of a matador (Mel Ferrer) who loses his nerve and gets it back again, Producer Rossen upsets the book's delicate balance between the tawdriness and nobility of bullfighting. He succeeds best, if at undue length, in picturing the bull ring much as he showed the prize ring in Body and Soul-as a commercialized racket that feeds its parasites, thrills its fickle crowds and lacerates its heroes in body and spirit. Despite some lip service in dialogue and commentary, he fails to do justice to bullfighting as an art, a code of honor...
This failure becomes crucial at the story's climax, when the jittery matador, scorned by the crowd, betrayed by his manager (Anthony Quinn) and his girl (Miroslava), suddenly sheds his fear and calmly faces death. Coming after the defeated, bitter tone of the picture up to that point, and without Novelist Lea's introspective motivation or an adequate dramatic substitute, the climactic scene seems arbitrary and pointless...
...young U.S. sportsman (Robert Stack) determines, almost as a lark, to learn how to handle the matador's fighting cape and sword. He persuades Mexico's leading bullfighter (Gilbert Roland) to teach him, falls in love with a high-born local girl (Joy Page) and then with the bulls. When Matador Roland dies in the ring while saving Stack's life, Stack, still an amateur, feels he must vindicate his honor and courage in the face of a hostile crowd and a raging bull...
...sailing-ship logs. He pieces together the faded fragments of how a gingery Scots lass, "imperious as any queen," commanded a clipper ship a hundred years ago and won little but disdain for her courage. In another story, a stranger in a bar tells a writer about a Spanish matador whose wife's treachery and infidelity drove him out of the bull ring and into exile. Those sufficiently versed in trick endings may arrive at the conclusion before the author does: the talkative stranger is the matador himself, and the unfaithful wife is the "senorita" the writer has just...
...Venice for the International Film Festival, Rossellini shrugged off the missiles with the air of a matador dodging a flying pop bottle. He was stalking bigger game. Charging that RKO had ruined his Stromboli, the film that got Ed Johnson's dander up in the first place, Rossellini withdrew it from the Venice competition and pressed a whopping damage suit against the company. RKO, said Rossellini, had destroyed Stromboli by bad cutting and had damaged its box-office appeal by "improper" advertising (sample: "Raging Island . . . Raging Passions"). Cried Rossellini: "I feel like I'm living in the fable...