Bien Venido Mr. Marshall

Spanish and Latin American Studies II

Lect. Dr. Jesús Urda

Spanish Cinema (part 1)

Case study 1:

Welcome Mr. Marshall (1953) Directed by Luis Garcia Berlanga; written by Juan Antonio Bardem, Mr. Garcia Berlanga and Miguel Mihura.

Director of photography, Manuel Berenguer;

Edited by Pepita Orduña;

Music by Jesús Garcia Leoz.

Running time: 78 minutes.

Cast: Lolita Sevilla (Carmen Vargas), Manolo Moran (Manolo), Jose Isbert (The Mayor), Alberto Romea (Don Luis), Elvira Quintilla (Eloisa), Luis Perez de León (Don Cosme), Félix Fernandez (Don Simón), Fernando Rey (Narrator)

Read the following articles/reviews about the film. Do you share the same views and impressions about the film?

Spain’s long wait for a latter-day Marshall Notebook: Obama’s visit invoked memories of a film from the Franco era

Tobias Buck – Madrid JULY 12, Guadalix de la Sierra is a place of no particular distinction in the foothills of the mountain range north of Madrid. It takes only a minute to drive from one end of the village to the other, and there is not much reason to stop along the way. Yet, to most Spaniards, Guadalix and its cream-coloured town hall are instantly recognisable. All they have to do is imagine the scene in black and white, and populate it with Don Pablo, the canny mayor; Carmen, the pretty Andalusian singer; and Manolo, her unscrupulous agent. They, together with much of the real-life local population, are at the heart of a seminal work of Spanish cinema — the hilarious, poignant, subversive, cruel and utterly absorbing ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall! Filmed in Guadalix during the Franco dictatorship, it has kept its relevance like no other work of the era. Even today, more than six decades on, it is shown regularly on television. It is part of the national conversation, held up as revealing essential truths about how Spain engages with the world and vice versa. US President Barack Obama‘s keenly awaited visit to the country on Sunday was just the latest event to trigger a flood of ¡Bienvenido Mr Marshall! headlines. His trip, though curtailed because of the Dallas shootings, offered a moment of cosmopolitan glamour to a country suffering the aftershocks of the economic crisis and facing yet more political uncertainty. The plot of the movie is quickly told. A Spanish delegation arrives to alert Don Pablo that his dirt-poor village is about to be visited by the US officials assigning funds from the postwar Marshall plan. If he and the locals make a good impression, heaven knows how much money they will receive. The village may even get its long-awaited railway connection. But how to impress the Americans? The answer is provided by Manolo, who claims to know them inside out: (“They are noble but infantile”). The US delegation will not want to see the real Spain, he explains, but a postcard version. That means converting the place into a faux Andalusian village, and dressing up the locals in flamenco costumes and Córdoba hats. At considerable expense, the transformation begins. Walls are whitewashed, geraniums hung from window sills. The village rehearses a welcome song for “los americanos”. All that is left to do is to wait for the delegates and their dollars to arrive. In Guadalix today the film is fondly remembered. The school is named after its director, Luis García Berlanga, and a statue of Don Pablo adorns the balcony of the town hall. At a day centre for old people, I meet Pedro García, who appears as an anonymous teenager in the crowd. Like the other villagers, he was paid 25 pesetas for every day of filming — a much-needed fillip at a time of deprivation. Don Pablo’s real-life successor is Angel Luis García Yuste. “People here are proud of the film because it put Guadalix on the map of Spain,” he says. He strikes me as a serious-minded local politician, focused on improving the small things. To him, the movie holds a simple message: “Don’t wait for others to come and do your work. Just sticking a flower in your hair doesn’t change anything.” But there is clearly more than this to ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall!, a film that leaves viewers in doubt as to who is being mocked more cruelly: the authorities or the people; the foreigners who come to Spain expecting bulls, flamenco and paella; or the Spaniards who are only too ready to fulfil these folkloric fantasies. On a more subtle level, ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall! also takes aim at Spain’s historic inferiority complex and the deeply embedded notion that salvation must always arrive from abroad. What was it that José Ortega y Gasset, the philosopher, said in 1910 about its backwardness compared with the rest of the continent? “Spain is the problem and Europe is the solution.” In their own crude way, the villagers embody the same hope. The Americans do eventually arrive. But their motorcade speeds through the village without stopping, leaving Don Pablo and the locals standing in a cloud of dust, waving their cardboard hats in disbelief. Then the rain starts, washing away the little flags and all those dreams of instant wealth — but heralding a decent harvest, if nothing else. The village, like Spain, will just have to help itself.

Review/Film; Audacious Spanish Comedy

By STEPHEN HOLDENNOV. 19, 1993 – The New York Times

"Welcome Mr. Marshall," a satirical Spanish comedy made in 1952, is a remarkably cheeky film considering that it was made during the repressive Franco era. Set in Villar del Rio, a tiny Andalusian farming village where life has hardly changed over many decades, it remembers an event that turned life upside down.

Shortly after the end of World War II, a Government official arrives in the village to announce that an American committee for the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe will be visiting Villar del Rio. Although it isn't clear exactly when the Americans will show up, every town in the region has been asked to prepare a grand welcome.

To the mostly uneducated farming population of Villar del Rio, the United States is about as remote as Mars, and the notion that one country would actually give something away without expecting something in return seems fishy. At a town meeting, the local schoolmistress reads off some facts and figures about America that make this supposedly beneficent nation sound like a crime-ridden country of warring ethnic groups.

The mayor is hard put to come up with a plan for an appropriately festive greeting until the manager of a popular singer from the village suggests they turn the community into a theatrical fantasy of an Andalusian town complete with cardboard facades and props. To pay for it all, the villagers agree to sell their valuables. Their investment, they reason, will soon repay itself many times over, once the Americans arrive with their gifts.

They imagine that the Marshall Plan committee, having arrived, will sit behind a table in the town square and, like kings distributing boons, grant each person his heart's desire. The village goes so far as to stage an elaborate dress rehearsal in which everyone solemnly lines up to put in his gift order. It goes without saying that when the Americans finally appear in Villar del Rio, things don't go as expected.

"Welcome Mr. Marshall," which opens today at the Joseph Papp Public Theater as part of its Spanish Eyes series, veers into the surreal with a succession of comic dream sequences about the soon-to-arrive Americans. In the funniest, the mayor (Jose Isbert), who suggests a chubby, hearing-impaired Jimmy Durante, slouches as a farcical caricature of an American cowboy star, facing down an outlaw in a bar that is a weird hybrid of an Old West saloon and a Spanish dance hall. The sequence mercilessly burlesques the rituals of American horse operas.

"Welcome Mr. Marshall," which was directed by Luis Garcia Berlanga, tells its story very economically. A narrator (Fernando Rey) offers a brief history of Villar del Rio and introduces the various key players. He returns at the end of the film to tie up the loose ends. The perfectly controlled tone of the performances is one of subdued farce with the faintest undercurrent of bittersweetness.

Although more than 40 years old, this funny, compassionate little fable has an ebullience and freshness that transcend its historical context.