La ilusión viaja en tranvía

Ignore the title and opening and closing narration that imply that there is more here than meets the eye, which is a humorous look at life in Mexico City in the early 1950's. Very nice location shooting.

Best scene: the pageant of the fall of Satan and of Adam and Eve.

Best actor: Agustín Isunza as a retired motorman trying to report that the street car has been stolen.

Another of Bunuel's Mexican films wherein he tells the picaresque tale of two bumbling streetcar workers who, after swiftly repairing a streetcar that had been deemed obsolete (and a few beers), decide to steal it for one last spin. Their adventures take them across Mexico City and in contact with a solid cross-section of the public, including slaughterhouse workers who gleefully (and surreally) hang huge slabs of meat (and heads) from the roof of the tram. Perhaps there is a metaphor or a moral here – certainly Bunuel takes the opportunity to poke fun at corporate capitalism – but any message takes a back seat (ahem) to the overall good time on offer. I particularly enjoyed the staging of Lucifer's banishment from Heaven and Adam and Eve's departure from Eden at the local festival, not unlike the amateur theatrical performances in Renoir's The Rules of the Game in their wacky but creepy surrealism.

On first viewing – again, as part of that 2007 Bunuel/NFT retrospective – I had found this to be an enjoyable but rather insubstantial comedy; on this revisit, my opinion has not changed about this minor work from the celebrated Spanish director. Indeed, I was surprised to learn (from the opening credits) that Bunuel was not even involved in the screen writing process of this one – although, I do not think it is a coincidence that the film's comic highlight is a wonderful "Garden of Eden" pageant sequence early on (in which the three protagonists playing God, Adam and a swim-suited Eve, are tormented by a heavily-horned Lucifer wearing a shirt sporting the word "serpent"!).

The film is fairly similar to Bunuel's earlier (and superior) Mexican 'road movie' ASCENT TO HEAVEN aka Mexican BUS RIDE (1952) in that it is set, for the most part, on a means of public transportation. Besides, its plot line of an ancient vehicle being taken for one last ride before ending up in a scrapheap also harks back to such classic comedies as Harold Lloyd's SPEEDY (1928) and Ealing's practically contemporaneous THE TITFIELD THUNDERBOLT (1953). Incidentally, Bunuel's cinematic idol Fritz Lang, made his own railroad movie that same year: the noir-ish melodrama HUMAN DESIRE (which I own but have yet to watch) – itself a remake of Jean Renoir's LA BETE HUMAINE (1938).

As usual with Bunuel's films from this period, it starts with a faux-documentary narration and, in this case, amusingly concludes on a "this was just one of a thousand stories" line a' la Jules Dassin's seminal noir THE NAKED CITY (1948). The director's depiction of the downtrodden Mexican villagers' everyday life (culminating in a riot when the smuggling of corn as fertilizer is accidentally discovered by one of the bumbling protagonists) brought on comparisons with Italy's then-current Neo-realist movement – something which Bunuel readily denied. Indeed, while the story could well have been inspired by a similarly liberating ride through the streets of Paris made by the Surrealist movement in 1931, the truth is that the film was commissioned by a nascent Mexican public transport company to counter the bad press caused by an accident they had had the previous year!

Two regular actors from Bunuel's work in Mexico – the lovely Lilia Prado and the amiably rotund Fernando "Mantequilla" Soto (as a streetcar conductor named Tarrajas) – also appear here, alongside Carlos Navarro (as Prado's streetcar mechanic boyfriend) and Agustín Isunza (as Papa Pinillos, a nosy ex-railroad employee). The perennially frustrated attempts of the two company employees to take back the streetcar they stole before its absence is discovered is paralleled by Papa Pinillos' constantly dismissed claims of this very theft to his pompous former employers.

Among the commuters who inadvertently get to make use of the runaway streetcar (the film's alternate title) are: a schoolmistress with her classroom of unruly children who are, eventually, stranded on a film set (an orphan in their midst is told that the long-legged starlet being made-up is his long-lost mother!); two elderly ladies carrying a statue of Jesus Christ in "Ecce Homo" guise; a couple of 'penniless' politicians; a clueless American tourist who mistakes the protagonists' reluctance to accept fare – which would have aggravated their misdemeanor – as "Communist" behavior (possibly, former party member Bunuel's barbed comment on the "Red Scare" then currently scourging through Hollywood); and, most memorably, slaughterhouse workers carrying their slabs of meat along as 'luggage'! I cannot forget to mention that, very early on in the film, there is also a throwaway laugh-out-loud moment when a billboard reads: "Well…so what?"

P.S. Surprisingly enough, the film played without a glitch on my Philips DVD player which, usually, has a lot of trouble dealing with DivX files!

The newly born Servicio DE Transportes Eléctricos del D.F. had to do this film to demeaning the bad press caused by "La Venta" accident the previous year, the story and some actors come from Subida al Cielo, and show the company shops at Indianilla neighborhood in México City. Aside from Buñuel intention of a series of sit-coms, his surrealism becomes an every day fact in the Mexican way of life, such anecdotes still happen at STE, now mostly with trolleybuses and the Xochimilco LRV. When we got a VHS copy, we showed it at Tetepilco depot, amusingly the Transportation Dept. boss was also an Ingeniero Benítez, and our efforts to save rolling stock from the torch, have became a nice Traction Museum, without everyone around getting drunk, I'm the Union Historian and had to check it frame by frame to list appearing units: At the opening scene we see several types later succeeded by the first Westram trolley-coaches and a PCC in the Transfer-table, 133 real number was 378, a Brill 11 windows 2-trucker, many points of Mexico City to be checked, for example when they leave the school kids at a filming it was at Calzada de Tlalpan across the gates of CLASA-Films! and the Overhead-repair trolley that block the return to the depot is to be restored at Tetepilco Museum. must add more comments later---

A streetcar is to be dismantled and two pals are not prepared to accept it.

Bunuel's touch can be felt in the scenes dealing with religion: -The show that takes Genesis to the stage ;the grotesque actors play God,Lucifer,Adam and Eve and more ...Certainly ,the director had much fun directing these scenes -which have little to do with the main plot- -The two ladies and their Virgin Mary statuette ;while people are giving raw meat for free (even heart!)in the streetcar,they are puzzled because "normally" you've got to pay for everything.They forget that Christ gave bread and fish to His people as reported by the Gospels.

Apart from these sequences,it is a simple comedy,and in Bunuel's great filmography,it is nothing by a curio.