Monday | July 30, 2012 7:00 pm

The Great Madcap
(El gran calavera)

Screening on Film

Directed by Luis Buñuel.
With Fernando Soler, Rosario Granados, Andrés Soler.
Mexico, 1949, 16mm, black & white, 92 min.
Spanish with English subtitles.

Buñuel's second and rarely screened Mexican film is a hilarious screwball send-up of the Mexican nouveau riche on the eve of the postwar petroleum boom. When a wealthy and hedonistic patriarch learns of his family's desire to teach him a lesson by pretending his fortune has been lost he decides to go a step further, launching a wild roller coaster of mistaken identity, sham marriages and misfired suicides. Subversive Buñuelian touches are apparent everywhere in The Great Madcap, especially in the constant fetishization of soiled feet that cuts against the requisite glamour of the Mexican studio system.