A lot of bull

Il momento della verità (The Moment of Truth) 1965 Italy Criterion (107 minutes) co-production, direction, story and screenplay by Francesco Rosi, cinematography by Gianni di Venanzo and Pasquale de Santis.

This is a great movie about bullfighting that captures both the essence of the sport and a moment in history with remarkable clarity.

It is a great bullfighting movie because the fights are real, including those featuring the film’s bullfighter protagonist, nonprofessional actor Miguel Mateo ‘Miguelín,’ and they are shot like sporting events.

The 300mm lens that director Francesco Rosi’s cameramen used to shoot the fights is the same type lens used to film football matches. It puts a viewer in the midst of action on the field, here in the ring. This works the better yet when the people doing the shooting are skilled and resourceful movie cinematographers and the film stock is Technicolor (this was Rosi’s first color film).

The historical moment is the high water mark of Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, with changes slowly taking shape that eventually would catapult Spain from its nineteenth century stasis into modern integrated post cold war Europe. 

The film won praise in Spain and abroad when it came out. Among ‘revisionist’ dismissals of the film since that time is that it shows Spain and bullfighting through the eyes of a ‘tourist.’ It was dubbed in Italian rather than presented with the richness of the original varieties of regional Spanish the cast of non-professional actors spoke. And bullfighting itself now is leagues beyond the pale of acceptable activities.

But the bullfighting is real; there is a lot of blood, and the crowds look and sound as local as they would at any mid-season baseball game at Boston’s Fenway Park.

The best word to describe this movie may be serendipity.

Rosi took small crew to Spain in the mid-1960s with an idea about filming the famous bull run at the annual San Fermín Festival in Pamplona.

In a 2004 interview, the director said that he had asked himself at the time: ‘If [Ernest] Hemingway, who did not know anything about Spain, could go there and write a wonderful book about bullfighting [Death in the Afternoon], and do it very competently, then why shouldn’t I be able to go there and understand something about it?’

At the San Fermín Festival, Rosi found among the ‘runners’ Miguel Mateo ‘Miguelín’, a photogenic young man with dreams of becoming a bullfighter.

The story that took shape was about Miguel Romero ‘Miguelín,’ a farm boy from Jaén in Andalusia who went to Barcelona to seek his fortune, took up bullfighting and made it to the big time. The crew spent an entire bullfighting season following Miguelín as he rose from a nobody in the amateur circuit to a professional. The narrative traces the outlines of classic American boxing pictures, with the attendant pitfalls.

There is not much work for nor interest in another unskilled laborer from ‘the south’ in sun-bleached, dun Barcelona, which even in color in the mid-1960s looks like a threadbare Italian neorealist postwar city.

But Miguel finds a ‘Maestro’ in the gruff Pedro Basauri ‘Pedrucho.’ Pedrucho is like a Spanish Burgess Meredith, except that he is the genuine article: an ex-pug bullfighter who teaches young men and boys how to fight bulls in his ‘school’ in the basement of a bar.

‘Do you know what the bull is?’ Pedrucho asks his boys. ‘The bull is sacred. Bullfighting is for real men. Not everyone can do it. It requires extraordinary sacrifice. You must hold the bull at all times in your head and in your heart.’

‘You have to get close to the bull, lie on him, keep the muleta [red apron] down and your right hand on your chest… All of you remember this,’ Pedrucho tells them, and when one strikes the bull with the kill shot, the sword through the shoulders to his heart, ‘questo è il momento della verità’—this is the moment of truth.

Miguelín works his way up the food chain of fight promoters and agents, from Don Ernesto and promoter Don Moises, a tailor and seller of fine equestrian and torero apparel, to ‘Impresario’ José Gomez Sevillano, the bullfighter agent Don José. 

In addition to Pedrucho, the bullfighters, fight promoters and agents all appear ‘as themselves.’ After Miguelín makes the big time, he meets members of the titled aristocracy and the nouveau rich connected to the Generalissimo; an American actress—Linda Christian, the only professional actor in the movie—seduces the young phenom.

All along, the bullfighting, filmed to capture the dynamic between bull and man which for so long has riveted the sport’s aficionados, is fascinating to watch.

The remarkable things are that this small Italian film crew managed in the first place to persuade Franco’s Spain to let them shoot the film, and the documentary style in which they went about recording what they saw.

Rosi films an elaborate religious procession during Holy Week in Seville. A magnificent catafalque emerges from a great cathedral, propelled slowly by unseen tens of men beneath it. Alongside this ark follow members of various religious brotherhoods masked in blue, black and purple capirotes, or hoods with high points that hark back to the time of the Inquisition, and a military band and goose-stepping soldiers in German helmets with Spanish fascist emblems.

Rosi also shows the labor-intensive rural Spain that Miguelín leaves. We see a large grain farm in 1960s Europe without a tractor or any mechanized equipment, peasants threshing and winnowing massive piles of grain on the ground. The young men Miguelín meets struggling for work in Barcelona are like him, internal migrants from the impoverished south. After Miguelín makes good, he buys his parents a house in which his mother gets her first telephone.

Big professional bullfights in cities like Madrid and Barcelona take place in large corridas, but amateur events in dusty rural towns are set in town squares within an impromptu ring of wooden-wheeled carts and hayricks faced with boards.

Along with the bullfighting and Miguelín’s compelling story, the fascinating thing about this picture is its indelible Technicolor images of Spain of the time.