The Brave Bullfighters

Hollywood rarely approaches bullfighting on its own terms. Most Americans do not understand the spectacle, and the Production Code's taboo on scenes of cruelty to animals makes it a difficult subject to film. This week two new bullfighting movies entered the ring:

The Brave Bulls (Columbia) is Producer-Director Robert (All the King's Men) Rossen's ambitious attempt to put Tom Lea's bestselling 1949 novel on the screen. Visually, the picture is thick with the hot, dusty atmosphere of the bull ring and the Mexican locale in which it nourishes. But beneath its colorful surface, the film is dramatically weak and confused.

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, a yardstick and symbol of courage.

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.

Like the script, Actor Ferrer* never gets inside the character, and Mexico's Actress Miroslava, a blonde edition of Rita Hayworth, protrudes from the Mexican atmosphere like a stock Hollywood femme fatale. Aficionados can take some solace in Director Rossen's bullfighting scenes, well-staged within Production Code limits, and the movie's wealth of such local color as a bull-breeding ranch and a religious street pageant.

Bullfighter and the Lady (Republic], produced by Actor John Wayne (who does not appear in it), will follow The Brave Bulls into the theaters, though it was banned long in advance. Also filmed in Mexico, and in the same bull ring, it is a modest movie, with an uncritically simple story. Yet it is a picture that shows more pointedly and dramatically what bullfighting is like, and its place in Latin life.

A 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 and violent excitement.

* No kin to Jose (Cyrano de Bergerac) Ferrer.

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