Word: matador
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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...
This unencumbered plot gives moviegoers a chance to learn the art of bullfighting with Stack, from its basic techniques to its intense traditions and harsh, proud standards. Actor Roland plays the professional matador with an aplomb and mature authority that appear nowhere in the cast of The Brave Bulls. He gets good support from Stack and Actresses Page and Katy Jurado, who seem more convincing as Mexican women than Miroslava. Directed by onetime matador Budd Boetticher and edited (without screen credit) by Producer Wayne's good friend, John Ford, the bullfighting sequences outdo Rossen's in stylized grace...
...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...