Vampiresas 1930

Despite my print being in Spanish (a language I don't speak) I quite enjoyed this early, non-horror outing from Franco until about half way through when it suddenly lurched into a comedy-thriller narrative. Up to that point it had been a quite amusing romantic comedy based around the last days of silent cinema: the performances were engaging and the frequent musical numbers pretty (especially the one at the guest house for musicians). There is an interesting moment when newspaper headlines proclaim the advent of talkies and the death of silents, which sees the main characters become destitute overnight. This could have been developed into an intriguing plotline, dealing with an often ignored period of cinema history but, Franco being Franco, he decides to up the ante and take the film into a whole new, almost entirely unconnected, area. It then becomes a pretty lame rip-off of SOME LIKE IT HOT, made the previous year. Never one to miss a trick Franco has made them not only cross-dressers but black impersonators too, piling bad taste on to bad taste. Naturally the film has nothing to do with vampires, except for the pre-credits scene showing a film being made, where one the actors wears a set of false vampire fangs.