Widely regarded (at least among older generations of Spaniards) as Spain's best ever film, this is first and foremost a comedy of rural manners that still, fifty years on, succeeds in its primary objective of making the audience laugh (show this to any Spanish-speaking audience in the world and you'll get giggles throughout. Beware, though, some of the humour is untranslatable or at least unsubtitleable.) On another level, it's a clever, ironic commentary upon the predicament of fifties Spain, isolated from the rest of the world not only politically but in pretty much every other respect too.
The film kicks off with an extended voice-over introduction in which a narrator introduces us to a village and its main characters, playfully exploiting the odd camera trick (freeze-frames, emptying a scene of people) and establishing a tone of gentle, affectionate irony towards the inhabitants. This offscreen narrator returns regularly through the film and the tone of the narration crucially defines how we respond to what we see on screen. The characters include the mayor (a shrewd old man suffering from intermittent deafness), a benign local priest, an "hidalgo" (soi-disant member of the nobility, obsessed with his ancestral heritage), a young, pretty schoolmistress, and a few others; there are also two important visitors, an Andalusian songstress and her jovial, sharp-witted agent.
The action of the film consists of the following (spoiler). News reaches the village that "the Americans are coming" in order to implement the Marshall plan, which is interpreted as the handing out of gifts to all the villagers. After a public meeting in which the schoolmistress and the priest between them attempt to define America to the villagers' satisfaction, the mayor teams up with the singer' agent to ensure the village puts on a good show to impress the visiting dignitaries, mainly by dressing itself up as a kind of folksy Andalusian village complete with guitar strummers and false building facades. Villagers queue up to have their individual requests recorded in advance (one item only). Finally, the Americans do arrive, but the visit consists of a cavalcade of fast cars that simply sweep through without stopping. (The last car has the word "Goodbye", in English, prominently displayed.) The villagers realise they have to pay for all the expense incurred in what turns out to have been a wasted show, but are not too unhappy: they take the disappointment stoically as "just one of those things".
As already mentioned, what carries the story is a combination of the gentle, affectionate tone of the narration, together with almost unstoppable wry humour, both verbal and visual, and sometimes quite subtle (the narrator asserts that the schoolmistress' arithmetic is beyond reproach: later, we notice some wrong adding up on the blackboard). The acting is first rate, the camera work slick, and all in all, if this isn't still Spain's best film it certainly deserves a place in the top three.
The film kicks off with an extended voice-over introduction in which a narrator introduces us to a village and its main characters, playfully exploiting the odd camera trick (freeze-frames, emptying a scene of people) and establishing a tone of gentle, affectionate irony towards the inhabitants. This offscreen narrator returns regularly through the film and the tone of the narration crucially defines how we respond to what we see on screen. The characters include the mayor (a shrewd old man suffering from intermittent deafness), a benign local priest, an "hidalgo" (soi-disant member of the nobility, obsessed with his ancestral heritage), a young, pretty schoolmistress, and a few others; there are also two important visitors, an Andalusian songstress and her jovial, sharp-witted agent.
The action of the film consists of the following (spoiler). News reaches the village that "the Americans are coming" in order to implement the Marshall plan, which is interpreted as the handing out of gifts to all the villagers. After a public meeting in which the schoolmistress and the priest between them attempt to define America to the villagers' satisfaction, the mayor teams up with the singer' agent to ensure the village puts on a good show to impress the visiting dignitaries, mainly by dressing itself up as a kind of folksy Andalusian village complete with guitar strummers and false building facades. Villagers queue up to have their individual requests recorded in advance (one item only). Finally, the Americans do arrive, but the visit consists of a cavalcade of fast cars that simply sweep through without stopping. (The last car has the word "Goodbye", in English, prominently displayed.) The villagers realise they have to pay for all the expense incurred in what turns out to have been a wasted show, but are not too unhappy: they take the disappointment stoically as "just one of those things".
As already mentioned, what carries the story is a combination of the gentle, affectionate tone of the narration, together with almost unstoppable wry humour, both verbal and visual, and sometimes quite subtle (the narrator asserts that the schoolmistress' arithmetic is beyond reproach: later, we notice some wrong adding up on the blackboard). The acting is first rate, the camera work slick, and all in all, if this isn't still Spain's best film it certainly deserves a place in the top three.