Mort d'un cycliste

This is much better than i expected, a great movie, possibly a masterpiece. On the surface, it's a typical crime drama/film noir, with a tragic event disturbing the lives of the leading characters, moral dilemmas which occur, with morally gray areas etc. But this is much deeper than a typical film noir, considering not only the movie itself but its whole historical background. I won't say much but i search for details and i found out that the director was imprisoned for this movie by dictator Franco. That fact by itself makes this movie an essential watch.

Thing is, this is so good that it can be viewed without all those details. There is a brilliant script and the characters are much more well written than other 50's film characters, these have "flesh and blood", you feel for them, you understand their troubles. The most interesting character is the protagonist. Up to a point, the whole movie was exciting but not unique. However something happened (the "incident" with his student) and from this point, movie elevated to a masterpiece, the protagonist transformed into something else and overall, the script was not a movie script anymore but great Literature.

The ending of this movie is not the original ending which was a much more powerful and daring ending. Unfortunately, the Dictatorship censored it. Yet, the ending of the movie was still good. But this 8.2/10 is a rating for the original ending.

Alberto Closas gave one of the greatest acting performances i have ever seen.

This and his next film 'Calle Mayor' established Juan Antonio Bardem as one of the world's leading filmmakers although as a Communist his far from complimentary view of those who had enriched themselves under Franco's regime was hardly likely to endear him to the authorities. He was in fact arrested whilst filming 'Calle Mayor' and was still in prison when 'Muerte de un Ciclista' won the International Film Critics' Award at Cannes.

Thematically it is inspired by Tolstoy's 'Resurrection' and filmically shows the influence of Antonioni's 'Cronaca di un amore'. Indeed Francois Truffaut, never one to mince his words, accused Bardem of plagiarism. Granted, there are what one critic has referred to as 'reinventions of Antonioni settings' but for this viewer at any rate these would probably not have occurred to me had they not been pointed out and certainly did not lessen my appreciation of Bardem's film.

The main link of course is the presence in both films of the charismatic Lucia Bosé, playing on both occasions an adulterous wife. Her lover here is well played by Alberto Closas but his character's crisis of conscience and moralisings somehow lack conviction. As the idealistic Matilde the lovely Bruna Corra provides a counterpoint to the self-obsessed Maria of Bosé. It is however the Uruguayan character actor Carlos Casaravilla who registers most strongly as a 'camp' art critic whose bitterness conceals a painful loneliness.

What strikes one most about the film is its technical brilliance. Atmospherically shot by Alfredo Fraile, the framing, compositions and use of close-ups are excellent and with the assistance of Margarita Orchoa, the only editor with whom Bardem worked until her death in the mid-sixties, there is an extremely effective use of cross-cutting and abrupt jump cuts. There is alas a brief shot of the cameraman's hand in the back of Maria's car and one is surprised that the director allowed it to remain.

He was obliged to cut the film from 91 to 88 minutes and one is intrigued as to what those three minutes contained. Needless to say censorship of the time required Maria to be punished for her crime and the ending, albeit highly melodramatic, is well handled and supremely ironic.

Despite being derivative in parts, this remains a landmark in post Civil War Spanish cinema and it is to be lamented that much of this courageous artiste's subsequent work was affected by government control.

Let me mildly dissent from the majority of my fellow IMDBers below in mildly praising this good but not great film that is not content to be simply a solid noir with a beautiful, sensually decadent femme fatale and interestingly set at the height (or depths, depending on the depth of your antifa leanings), of Franco's Spain, but instead needs to show off its intellectual cred by going all "Crime And Punishment" on us with the attendant soul searching, breast beating and philosophizing which is bearable when Dostoevsky does it, 'cause he's a friggin GENIUS, but is a bit of a bore when essayed by Juan Antonio Bardem, who is not. Give it a B minus.

A 1955 Spanish language film (from Spain) which finds a well to do couple (Albert Closas & Lucia Bose) hitting a bicyclist on the road one night & decide to flee from the scene of the crime. Once back in their respective corners (Bose is married & stepping out w/Closas) they both descend into their own moral quandaries w/Closas guilt ridden (heading to the victim's neighborhood to find out about the man) while Bose is blasé about the whole thing even though a hanger-on in her social circle insinuates he knows what happened. Closas is inconsolable however even suggesting towards the film's end to turn themselves over to the authorities which doesn't end well for him. Getting much mileage from guilt, director Juan Antonio Bardem (who turns out to be an uncle to Oscar winner Javier Bardem) milks the moody lighting for all its worth w/winning performances across the board especially Bose who is perfect as the femme fatale.

Breaking the Rules

Juan Antonio Bardem's Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist)

The Formation of a Unique Hybrid of Spanish Cinema

1955. At the height of the cold war, almost twenty years under the Franco regime, Spain, a country fiercely divided by poverty and societal division prepares with the support of the United States, to enter into the United Nations. American investors arrive in Spain for the chance to buy into the developing Spanish economy. Meanwhile on a cold winter's day, dusk is falling and the Sun's dying rays hit the highway. Enrique Arízaga cycles past and off into the outlying horizon. Almost as soon as he has gone out of sight, a screeching of brakes is heard in the distance and a black car slams to a halt around the bend; the cricket chirps. A man jumps out and rushes over. On observing the cyclist is still breathing, he calls over to the woman, inside the car. She gets out and calls back over to him. The woman beckons him again to desert the scene of the accident, leaving the cyclist to die. The car moves off again disappearing towards Madrid.

In the immediacy of its establishing sequence, Juan Antonio Bardem's Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist) already outlines the foundations and circumstances behind the film's plot. An adulterous couple, Juan (Alberto Closas) and María José (Lucia Bosè) run down a cyclist on their way back to Madrid after a clandestine meeting in the outskirts. Rather than call for help the couple, fearful of the discovery of their adulterous relationship, flee the scene of the accident. Bardem's film focuses on the tribulations and strains on the characters' relationship from that point onwards and the lengths they go to keep their crimes of adultery and murder under cover.

Spanish director Juan Antonio Bardem (1922-2002) explored and made use of a variety of genres within his early career. In Esa pareja feliz (1951) and ¡Bienvenido Mr Marshall! (1953), both joint ventures with contemporary Luis García Berlanga, Bardem through the conventions of comedy was able to develop a structure of parody and political satire. In Cómicos (1954), Bardem was heavily influenced by the genre of Hollywood melodrama, in particular that of films such as All About Eve (1950), a convention he would continue to develop throughout later films including Calle Mayor (1956).

Throughout Muerte de un ciclista Bardem develops a compound of contrasting style and genre to represent key issues within Spanish society. Prominent themes and genres within the film include film noir and the femme fatale mould, the Hitchcock suspense thriller, Italian neo-realism and soviet montage. Bardem uses these contrasting elements directly after one another in order to create what Marsha Kinder refers to as a 'rupture' within the centrality of the plot of the Hollywood melodrama. In the same way as the unnatural cutting and contrasting imagery Bardem uses, the film is able to ideologically expose corrupt and immoral elements of the Franco regime. The focus of this essay is to explore and to investigate these various elements and analyse the way in which they come together in forming a hybrid that is unique within the history of Spanish cinema.

Through the usage of a variety of contrasting elements and genre Bardem is able to ideologically expose the corrupt elements of the Franco regime. Today Muerte de un ciclista stands as a critique of the conformist values that it ridicules and attempts to tear apart. It breaks all the rules and shows the power of cinema to revolutionise daily life. In the same way as Bardem's characters of María José who breaks the conformist gender rules of Francoist Spain, Matilde who rebels against the institutional system and Juan who goes against the corruption and falseness of his class background, so too does Muerte de un ciclista rebel both by taking a stand against the corrupt Franco regime and also by breaking the rules of mainstream conventional cinema in order to present something vitally fresh and unique in Spanish film. Alfred Hitchcock once noted that it is important to know the limits of commercial cinema. Bardem is able to successfully use a clash of genre to stretch the viewer close to an absolute limit and is subsequently able to breakdown and underline the key political issues surrounding contemporary Spanish society. In the same way as the moral courage that the character of Juan is able to attain, Bardem seeks to signify the same moral fibre that the Spanish regime strove to repress. Like the broken window imagery that Bardem puts forward towards the end of the film, so too does a hole within the melodramatic centrality serve as a central element within the film's plot in order to be clashed with and torn apart. It is through this hybrid and "rupture" of genre that Juan Antonio Bardem's Muerte de un ciclista has been able to create a quintessential feat in Spanish cinema.

Harrison Cohen

"What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?" – Lady Macbeth