The Death of Manolete

Death can be small and cold. It can be a hard black pistol. Or it can be huge and hot; it can be half a ton of giant lumbering animal. Manolete knew death as the animal. A rush of black hide and ripping white horn blurring past an inch from the ankle. A bullfighter is significant because in his important moments he fights and defeats the animal; the animal means death, and in the final important moment the animal must kill him.

Manolete was a significant man. And that is why one can sit through a hundred minutes of drivel movie to see fifteen of Manolete. The Death of Manolete is another Spanish Horatio Alger story. The only road to fame and wealth open to a poor Spanish boy as everyone knows by now is the bullring. The whole story, from dodging calves with a wooden sword to the inevitable fatal goring is told through old photographs of varying tones and textures, accompanied by a vaguely familiar soundtrack of bullfight music and roaring crowds.

Barnaby Conrad, whose film it is, does manage to fit in batches of pictures. He has done a good editing job, switching from angle to angle, or from long-shot to close-up at the right speed--enough time for a good look, but fast enough to impute action.

Fast editing is about the most notable element in the second-part of the Brattle's double bill. Unfortunately the cutting is done by somebody who had a lot of good ideas, but little taste. But what makes The Age of Infidelity a total dud is that the plot is as slow as the scene-switching is fast.

Infidelity is a tiresome and out-of-joint job about some kind of moral dilemma, involving the death of a bicycle rider. The hero and heroine, obviously big stars in their country from the footage wasted on their faces, are man and mistress. There's a lot of claptrap about living in an age with too many symbols, returning to the old integrity of student days, etc. Of course at the end there comes the uncomfortably awaited Spanish Irony--the heroine is run off the road by the eternal bicycle rider. If you want to go to the seven thirty show, manage to arrive about a quarter of nine.