A car pulls up in Plaza de España and picks up a man who has been waiting there for a while. The man gets into the back seat where another man with a stern, impassive face, the face of a classic villain, hands him a revolver. The car heads down Paral·lel Avenue, dodging horse-drawn carts, other cars, and trams, and stops at various points to pick up other passengers. The dramatic music of Joan Duran i Alemany underscores the mounting tension. At Drassanes, the last one gets in. Now there are five, including the driver, and they are ready to pull off the heist of their lives.
This is how El cerco began, which marked Miguel Iglesias Bonn's second foray into neo-realist film noir that positioned Barcelona as one of the great settings for European crime fiction, during the 1950s and 1960s.
Released during the Mercè festivities of 1955, on his blog Adrián Esbilla defines El cerco as Iglesias's "most solid and enduring work," which the expert defines as "a professional forced to develop much of his career in a hostile environment. A director with a certain sense of craft and few opportunities to develop it, who found in his two purely police works from the mid-50s and in the industrial conditions in which they were made the ideal place to briefly establish himself as a Spanish counterpart to Don Siegel or Phil Karlson; to which was added an evident influence of French polar, in terms of types, aesthetics, and virile ethics."
Shortly before, the filmmaker had premiered the notable El fugitivo de Amberes, a brave film that made genuine plot twists to evade the bite of a bloodthirsty censorship, and presented us with the story of a communist fugitive from the Civil War as an anti-hero with whom the audience could not help but connect.
With El cerco, Iglesias repeated his technical team and also walked the fine line of presenting us with protagonists from the criminal underworld who, to make matters worse, bore evident similarities to active members of the maquis, such as the anarchist Josep Lluís Facerías. The villains who are, in many ways, the real heroes. Thus, the film featured Francesc Pérez-Dolz as assistant director, Joan Bosch as screenwriter, and Teresa Alcocer as editor, among others who had already converged in the director's previous film, to once again tread the fine line of telling the story from the criminals' point of view.
The result was a film applauded by the public and critics in Barcelona and reviled by Madrid critics (which, given the context, could even be considered a merit). A clear example that, before the so-called Barcelona School, there was another great school here: that of film noir that sought to capture the best of American and European seventh art transferred to the underworld (and, sometimes, high echelons) of this city, with the ability to play cat and mouse with censorship.
One of our own reservoir dogs
When the first film directed and written by Quentin Tarantino, the excellent Reservoir Dogs, premiered in 1991, voices immediately rose, clarifying that it was an adaptation of a 1987 Hong Kong production titled City on Fire. But, beyond the obvious points of connection between the two, this kind of story has much deeper roots. At least, since Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, released in 1956. Or even before. And El cerco can be one of those precedents.
The story is simple: a group of robbers plans a clean and perfect heist, in this case a robbery of a foundry by posing as government agents. But things get out of control, there are deaths, and the group flees, with one of the criminals wounded, each in a different direction. Everything has gone wrong. Little by little, they will fall, as the walls close in as justice—and their own bad decisions—catch up with them. To try to escape, the protagonist —an impeccable José Guardiola with a hard face and stern expression, almost a Spanish Henry Silva— will turn to his lover, an amoral woman, one of those who smoked and kept company with men, played by the beautiful Portuguese actress Isabel de Castro.
The origin of this story can be traced to the novel Es vessa una sang fàcil, by Manuel de Pedrolo, one of the towering figures of Catalan crime fiction, from which Espinàs' play, És perillós fer-se esperar, would also emerge, and from this, in turn, Julio Coll's magnificent feature film Distrito quinto, another clear precedent for Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. In both cases, however – and despite a critique stubbornly intent on accusing this cinema of being a cheap copy of what was being made in the United States – with the ability to unmistakably portray that lumpen and hungry Barcelona where politically motivated bullets still flew.
First mention of the maquis
In 1950s Spain, censorship established strict rules for portraying criminals in fiction. In no case could a narrative undermine or question ecclesiastical morality, promote any type of leftist idea or attitude, or cause the slightest wavering in the sacrosanct authority of the State. Crime had to be presented "as something hateful" and "easy forgiveness for the criminal" had to be avoided.
"El cerco evaded such impositions to more than acceptable limits, camouflaging itself behind its vocation as a 'crime chronicle'"
In this context, a film like El cerco had the courage to adopt the point of view of the criminals. And on top of that, it was based on five real cases: "five events that took place in Barcelona and were published in the press at the time," it announced.
"El cerco evaded such impositions to more than acceptable limits, camouflaging itself behind its vocation as a 'true-crime chronicle'," argues Antonio José Navarro in La edad de oro del cine policíaco español. This meant that, although censorship accused a "climate of excessive harshness and unusual violence, reprehensible conduct, ambiguous characters, dubious exemplarity," the film managed to be released.
The way he achieved this was through the initial intertitles, in which a text with a moralizing tone warned that "the present film has no other object than to remind that crime never escapes its just punishment." This was a common resource in a large number of films that, adopting the perspective of the criminal protagonist, and exposing themselves to unfavorable censor reports for their release, began with a discourse of this type. In the case of Juventud a la intemperie (Ignacio Iquino, 1961), for example, the film opened with a phrase by José Antonio Primo de Rivera and a speech steeped in stale Francoist rhetoric, before starting with a first scene with Julián Mateos with a beatnik look and a stunning Rita Cadillac with very little clothing.
Returning to El cerco, as Ramon Espelt states in his essential Ficció criminal a Barcelona 1950-1963, "part of the critics debated about 'the Spanishness' of the film." In Franco's Spain, there could not be criminal gangs like those that this and other films of the genre made in Barcelona portrayed. This –their argument was simple– is not gangster Chicago. In 1939 the regime had brought peace and whoever dared to question it was an enemy of the homeland. Or, at least, was suspicious.
A production team car heading with different weapons to a filming location was intercepted by the police, and it took Iglesias a lot of effort to prove that it was for a movie and that he and his team were not an anarchist group
And yet, Joan Bosch, screenwriter of El cerco, directly referred to real events, which, to make matters worse, had been carried out – or responded to the modus operandi – by anarchists such as Josep Lluís Facerias or Quico Sabaté. This is the case of the robbery at the beginning, with the criminals posing as tax inspectors to enter a factory and execute their plan. Or the scene in which Martín (played by Luis Induni) is caught on the trolleybus by the police, and before dying tries to remove the pin from a grenade, which is based on the death of the maquis César Saborit in 1951.
“El cerco will not be the only film, but it will be the first to fictionalize – and associate with common delinquency – the actions of the maquis, which were still current,” explains Espelt in his book, where he narrates that, in the months of May to June 1955, Quico Sabaté's group carried out several actions and adds a very illustrative anecdote: A car from the production team heading with different weapons to a filming location was intercepted by the police, and it took Iglesias a lot of effort to prove that it was for a film and that he and his team were not an anarchist group.
Later, films like the excellent Los atracadores (Francisco Rovira Beleta, 1962) and especially A tiro limpio (Francisco Pérez-Dolz, 1963) would delve much more directly and categorically into linking their protagonists with the maquis. But in both cases, they had an obvious, and very brave, precedent in El cerco.
Neorealism, verism, and Barcelona as more than just a set
Where critics and the Barcelona public recognized in Miguel Iglesias's film the characteristic underworld of the city, Madrid critics attacked it and, in general, Barcelona's film noir, considering it anti-Spanish. One of the cards the regime used to try to demonize local cinema was a supposed crude imitation of Italian neorealism, which the local luminaries called “verism,” and which they considered out of place in Franco's supposedly idyllic Spain.
Antonio José Navarro cites, as an example of this, “the foolish triumphalism” of critic José Luis Gómez Tello, a former divisionary and collaborator in publications such as El Alcázar or Arriba, who, in a bold exercise of denial of reality, went so far as to assert that “in Spain there was no hunger, misery […] and the privations of a post-war period” that could lead to its cinematographic extrapolation in the form of neorealism. Of course not.
While, in general, films made in Barcelona at the time suffer from a lack of humor and sarcasm that is present in the production of great Italian neorealists such as Rossellini, Lattuada, De Sica, or Germi, its influence is undeniable in a large number of films shot in Barcelona between the 50s and 60s. A city submerged in misery (moral and otherwise) and where its streets and inhabitants almost become another character.
It is the example of Hay un camino a la derecha (Francisco Rovira Beleta, 1953) in which Paco Rabal walks through a Barrio Chino and Drassanes that were filmed with hidden cameras, linking the film to masters like Gillo Pontecorvo. Or of Apartado 1001 (Julio Salvador, 1950), with such a profusion of exteriors that, to attract an audience, the advertisement read: "come to the cinema to see yourself."
Nor was it an isolated case. The aforementioned Los atracadores, based on the great novel by Tomás Salvador, portrays the port and the Somorrostro beach in a clear prefiguration of what, years later, would become quinqui cinema. It's impossible not to mention the impactful ending of the also mentioned A tiro limpio, with a shootout in the Lesseps metro. Or El ojo de cristal (Antonio Santillán, 1956), with scenes filmed in the old gasometer and in the streets of the Gòtic. Or A sangre fría/ Trampa al amanecer (Juan Bosch, 1959), where we see a young and a a rock-and-roll-styled young Carlos Larrañaga moving through the streets of La Verneda. And the list goes on.
El cerco is also also belongs to that strain of verism inspired by Italian neorealism, in addition to an evident influence of French polar. Espelt resorts to Iglesias himself who, in a conference organized in Sitges in August 1955, defended his film as a "neo-realist both for its grounding in reality and for its refusal to pander to audiences."
Iglesias would occasionally return to the realm of noir during the 50s and 60s, combining it with other genres. In the 70s he would focus, as director and producer, on low-budget cinema and, in 1988, he would sign his last film, Barcelona connection, based on the famous novel by Andreu Martín, where he once again combined the ingredients of local noir cinema: mafias, blood and a Barcelona where, whether you deserve it or not, any bullet can carry your name.