All the great dictators of the early 20th century loved film and saw cinema as a tool for molding the popular imagination. And yet, Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini never commissioned a movie based on their own autobiographical writings. That distinction belongs to Spain’s dictator, Francisco Franco. Director Jose Luis Saenz de Heredia turned Franco’s novel Raza, a fictionalized (and glorified) account of his early life, into a film.
Jeremy Treglown’s book Franco’s Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936 (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is a provocative examination of the Franco dictatorship as depicted in Spain during his lifetime and as remembered today. One of Treglown’s themes is how creativity can flourish under censorship, with the anticipated objections of the authorities forming a set of challenges to be overcome. Authorial intent can be concealed behind an ambiguity of interpretation or a sense of humor that spoofs so many targets that the censors overlook the critiques of the regime while laughing at the pokes at others. In one of Treglown’s favorite Franco-era films, Luis Garcia Berlanga’s Welcome, Mister Marshall!, each “moment carries some quiet, half-hidden joke.” Mister Marshall can be interpreted as a satire on meddlesome foreigners, on the U.S. (Franco’s relations with America were sometimes frosty at the edges), on Franco’s folkloric cultural policies, the prejudices of Roman Catholicism, the machinations of provincial bumpkins and of uncaring officials from the distant capital.
Treglown is both an academic and a journalist; Franco’s Crypt merges the best elements of both professions in its careful observations, grasp of historical context and a rapier wit that spares the pieties of no sides in the debate over Spain’s past. As in the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy, interesting and even great art occurred in Franco’s Spain as well as genuflecting propaganda. And not everything produced in opposition to the regime can claim greatness or even much interest.
As for Franco, he enjoyed Casablanca in the privacy of his palace, but restricted public access to the Hollywood classic. Like his foe Stalin, Franco enjoyed his nights at the movies.
