From Silver Screen to Spanish Stage

The Humorists of the Madrid Vanguardia and Hollywood Film

Stuart Nishan Green

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781783164653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Customs & Traditions
• Index: Social Sciences

This is the first book-length English-language study of a group of five artists closely linked with the Spanish avant-garde in the 1920s and 1930s, now known as the 'Other' Generation of 27. In the same way that their contemporaries of the celebrated Generation of 27 (which included Federico Garcia Lorca) attempted a revolution of the arts through poetry inspired by European modernism, the 'Other' Generation of 27 attempted to renovate Spanish humour, first in prose, and then in the theatre and cinema. This book demonstrates how these humorists drew on the humour of Chaplin, Keaton, Lubitsch and the Marx Brothers for their stage comedy, and how they stretched the limits of the stage at the time by incorporating cinematic techniques, such as flashback, voice-overs and montage, in their search for new dramatic forms.

Chapter 1

From Madrid to Hollywood and Back Again: Crushed by the Reels of Industry

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Design for Living

The humorists’ keen interest in cinema began, as it did for many born at the turn of the twentieth century, during their childhood. In a 1945 interview, López Rubio recounted at great length the films he remembered from his adolescence. The extensive list of titles, stars and genres he provided reveals both the indelible impression that cinema made on him at this time and the variety of films that he saw:

¡Maravillosas películas francesas iluminadas a mano!: ‘Moisés salvado de las aguas’, ‘Viaje a la luna de Cyrano de Bergerac’ y la risa delirante de las películas cómicas, como aquel ‘Ciclista miope’, que atropellaba los puestos de un mercado...

... Eran los años buenos del gallo de Pathé Fréres (sic), y las películas ya eran películas de verdad. El primer film de aviación, ‘El rey del aire’ (sic). El primer detective en la pantalla Nick Winter...

...No me gustaron las películas de ‘romanos’, que encontraba aburridas (López Rubio, in Corma, 1945, pp. 22–3).

(What wonderful, hand-coloured French films! Infancy of Moses (Anon., 1912), Les Aventures de Cyrano de Bergerac (Albert Capellani, 1911), and the delirious laughter of the comic films of Patouillard, who would crash into market stalls on his bicycle...

Those were the good years of the Pathé Frères rooster, and when films were real films. The first aviation film Le Roi de l’air (René Leprince and Ferdinand Zecca, 1913). The first screen detective Nick Winter...

... I did not enjoy the films set in ancient Rome; I found them dull.)

The humorists remained avid cinema-goers in the 1920s, as they embarked on careers in the arts. By this time, their viewing habits were dominated by Hollywood and what has come to be known as the classical fiction film.1 Some of those titles which appeared to Jardiel far superior to contemporary Spanish theatre are listed in Carlos Fernández Cuenca’s reminiscences about the time spent with him during this period:

Algunas películas que le gustaban volvía a verlas a los pocos días del estreno; así ocurrió con las primeras comedias americanas de Lubitsch, como La locura del charlestón y con Sus primeros pantalones, revelación del director Frank Capra y del extraordinario cómico Harry Langdon de fugaz nombradía (Fernández Cuenca, quoted in Fernández, 2001, p. 25).

(Some films he liked so much he would watch them again a few days after they premiered; such was the case with the first American comedies of Lubitsch like So This is Paris (Ernst Lubitsch, 1926) and with Long Pants (Frank Capra, 1927), the revelation of director Frank Capra and of the extraordinary – but soon forgotten – comedian Harry Langdon.)

In a letter sent to López Rubio from New York in spring 1928, Neville (in López Rubio, 2003, p. 137) mentions that he was visiting the cinema three times a day, most probably on account of his role as east coast correspondent and critic for La Pantalla.

Cinema was of particular importance for the humorists during this period in that it epitomized two qualities which they too endeavoured to cultivate as part of the Madrid vanguardia. On the one hand, film was quintessentially modern. In the humorists’ writings, this quality is evident specifically in their association of film with youth, most notably in its popularity with dating couples. In Don Clorato de Potasa, the narrator explains that Gustavo would very much like to date a North American lady because his ‘espectáculo preferido era el cine’ (Neville, 1969, p. 67) (favourite kind of show was a film). The eponymous protagonist of Margarita is invited to the cinema by several suitors.2 The second source of appeal of film for the humorists as members of the vanguardia was that it was still to be fully embraced by the bourgeoisie. Some members of this social group viewed it with suspicion, an attitude epitomized by Don Sacramento in Tres sombreros, who includes cinema among those activities which he distrusts and considers inappropriate for someone of his class (Mihura, 2004b, p. 159). The principal target of the humorists’ remarks in this respect was not the outright rejection of cinema by part of the bourgeoisie, however, but the fact that little discrimination was exhibited by those of this class who watched films regularly. On a number of occasions, the humorists wrote of the disruptive presence of bourgeois women in auditoria. In one article, Jardiel (1929b, p. 1235) lampoons the middle-aged housewife who is too slow to read the intertitles of a Greta Garbo film and is jealous of the Swedish actress’s beauty. Neville was equally unforgiving in his review of Viva Villa! (Jack Conway, 1934), the screening of which was impeded by certain ‘señoras tan mal educadas que hablan alto durante la proyección’ (Neville, 1935v, p. 4) (very rude ladies who speak loudly during the film). In La vida en un hilo, Neville pokes fun at the provincial bourgeoisie’s film-viewing habits as one of many examples of its lack of sophistication: in the dinner party sequence, the mother of the guest family speaks of her desire to see a (fictitious) film entitled ‘Las nueve huerfanitas, que dicen que es preciosa’ (The Nine Little Orphan Girls, which I hear is lovely). Still more laughter is obtained at the expense of this group in the equivalent scene of the stage adaptation. Firstly, the mother of the Vallejo family has nothing to say about The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957) except that ‘A mí me gustan mucho los japoneses porque son pequeñitos, pero muy guerreros’ (Neville, 1969, p. 323) (I like the Japanese because they are very small but have fighting spirit). Soon after, her daughter, Luisita, is reprimanded for explaining that the adulterous relationship between Victor Marswell and Linda Nordley in Mogambo (John Ford, 1953) has been changed by censors to one that is not adulterous and therefore tolerable in the eyes of the Catholic Church.3

The humorists were not indiscriminate in their praise of Hollywood cinema and its stars, however. In a number of publications, Jardiel demystified aspects of film which he disliked by means of absurd flights of the imagination. One such piece on screen representations of adultery lists various fates which befall the lover, each of which is more fantastical than the last:

a veces se queda paralítico; otras veces pierde la memoria, a consecuencia de un vuelco de automóvil, y fallece el día que se le olvida respirar; otras veces muere aplastado por una locomotora; o naufraga y se pasa el resto de su vida comiendo cocos en una isla desierta; o huye a Filadelfia a vender bastones; o se hace monedero falso y acaba en presidio; o queda sepultado en un hundimiento de una mina; o se coloca de guardia en Broadway, esquina a la calle Treinta y siete (Jardiel Poncela, 1928a, p. 445).

(sometimes he is left paralytic; at other times he suffers memory loss in a car accident and dies one day on forgetting to breathe; on other occasions he is flattened by a train; or he is shipwrecked and spends the rest of his life eating coconuts on a desert island; or he escapes to Philadelphia to sell walking sticks; or he becomes a counterfeiter and ends up in jail; or he is buried by a cave-in at a mine; or he finds work as a policeman on Broadway and 37th Street.)

Jardiel also ridiculed the repetition and lack of invention found in many Hollywood films. An article in La Pantalla identifies twenty clichés of the western, a genre which is summed up in Jardiel’s final proclamation that ‘Casi todas las películas “del Oeste” son idiotas’ (1929a, p. 936) (Nearly all westerns are stupid). The western, the adventure genre and films set on trains were subjected to the same treatment in Gutiérrez (Jardiel Poncela, 1965, vol. 3, pp. 197–204, 1099–100). Many of Jardiel’s comments in these articles are perceptive, and demonstrate his extensive film-viewing. In the article on adultery, for instance, he details the various traits of a particular type of male often cast as the romantic lead, the exaggerated gestures which actors tended to use, and the stylistic conventions employed to heighten dramatic tension on screen. In these articles and the alternative voice-over commentaries in his Celuloides rancios, Jardiel exposes the formulaic nature of much cinematic production in the same way that he parodied the romantic novel in Amor se escribe sin hache and the family melodrama in Madre (el drama padre) (‘The Mother of All Dramas’).

Jardiel’s dissections of these hackneyed elements of Hollywood productions comprise one instance of the burgeoning media epistemology at this time. In such references, he assumes a wide knowledge of cinema on the part of his readers. Most examples of media epistemology in the writings of the humorists do not condemn, however. Instead, they employ film titles and stars as material on which to test their novel comic devices; the interest and amusement of such publications resides principally in the instances of humor nuevo that they contain. The star whose name appears most often in this respect is Greta Garbo. Mihura’s 1929 article ‘Greta Garbo y las máquinas de retratar’ centres on the character of the vamp with which she had risen to fame in films such as Flesh and the Devil (Clarence Brown, 1926). In his imaginary interview, Mihura makes extensive use of infantilism and the commonplace among other devices:

-Oiga usted, doña Greta Garbo, viuda de Jiménez, esa inclinación suya a ser vampiresa, ¿de quién la heredó usted? ¿De su mamá o de su papá? ¿Era su papá el vampiro o era su mamá la vampiresa, o los dos eran vampiresones?

-Ni el uno ni el otro, señor.... yo soy vampiresa de oído, ya que jamás he ido a ninguna escuela de vampiresas como van otras niñas delgaditas (Mihura, 2004a, p. 483).

(“Excuse me, Greta Garbo, widow of Mr Jiménez. Your penchant for being a vamp, from whom was it inherited? From your mummy or from your daddy? Was your mummy a vamp or was your daddy a vampire, or were both of them vampirers?”

“None of the above, sir.... I learnt to be a vamp by ear; I never went to vamp school like other skinny girls.”)

Even in 1941, shortly before Garbo withdrew abruptly from the public gaze, Jardiel relied on Garbo’s near synonymity with the vamp for a joke in Madre when Baselgo hears of his middle-aged sister’s many suitors (Jardiel Poncela, 1965, vol. 2, p. 305). Mihura’s article on Garbo is the second of a trilogy on some of the most famous stars of the time. In the first, ‘Adolfo Menjou y el pasador de cuello’, Mihura takes for granted that the reader is aware that Adolphe Menjou personified a certain suave, affected masculinity. ‘Clara Bow y la Calle de Alcalá’ makes similar assumptions as regards Bow’s greatest success, It (Clarence G. Badger, 1927), and what the ‘it’ of the title was. Jardiel wrote a similar article about Renée Adorée, Ramón Novarro and Adolphe Menjou entitled ‘Breves biografías de artistas que ya no están de moda’ at this time. Here, he incorporates non-sequiturs and the commonplace into tall tales of how certain film stars rose to fame (Jardiel Poncela, 1965, vol. 3, p. 196).4 Mihura and Tono continued to draw on film stars in a similar way later in their careers. In a series entitled ‘Recordemos con lágrimas en los ojos aquellas películas que nos hicieron hombres’, the former employs the inverisimilar in the creation of synopses of imaginary films with the most bizarre storylines (Mihura, 2004a, pp. 717–18, 719–21). At the same time, the latter wrote imaginary life stories of some of the biggest Hollywood stars of the moment that recall those of Jardiel, as well as numerous others in collaboration with Mihura as Tomi-Mito (Tono, 1940a; 1941a; 1941b and 1941c, and Mihura, 2004a, pp. 637–47, 759–64).

The humorists’ use of the figures of silent cinema in this way runs parallel to the references to film stars in the writings of other contemporaries in the Madrid vanguardia. Garbo and Bow are two of those who feature in César Arconada’s Vida de Greta Garbo (‘The Life of Greta Garbo’) and 3 cómicos del cine (‘3 Film Comedians’), published in 1929 and 1931 respectively. Arconada’s texts are examples of a new approach to biography practised by novelists of the European avantgarde towards the end of the 1920s, in which fiction was interwoven with fact in a highly poetic style. Aware of a similar combination of fact and fiction in the creation of the film star, Arconada took Garbo and others merely as a convenient pretext for literary expression. As Nigel Dennis and Francisco Soguero note regarding the second of these books:

El biógrafo, perdido en las sombras, cede el paso continuamente al poeta delirante que, embriagado de palabras, suele poner en primer plano el libre vuelo de su impulso creador: el lenguaje mismo. No sorprende constatar que hay páginas enteras en que los tres cómicos se pierden de vista; el auténtico protagonista de la narración no es otro que la palabra misma (Denni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors' Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Notes on style
• Abbreviations
• Dedication
• Introduction: Was there ever a(n Other) Generation of 1927?
• Chapter 1: From Madrid to Hollywood and Back Again: Crushed by the Reels of Industry
• Chapter 2: Transitions from Screen to Stage
• Chapter 3: The Remediation of Cinema in the Theatre of the Humorists of the Madrid vanguardia: Innovation and Compromise
• Chapter 4: Make 'em Laugh: The Humorists and Hollywood Comedy
• Conclusion: Remediation and Mediatization in Spain: Then and Now
• Notes
• References