Two Blu-rays from Severin Films demonstrate how Spanish cinema of the 1970s began baring its teeth, literally. Released in 1977, Eloy de la Iglesia’s The Creature (La Criatura) and Antonio Isasi’s A Dog Called Vengeance (El Perro) present contemporary issues literally from a dog’s eye view. We’ll try to keep a tight leash on the canine metaphors, but it won’t be easy.
PopMatters has previously discussed the paradoxical place of Spanish filmmakers during the final years of General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. Although muzzled by censors (there we go), artists tried to get away with mysterious thrillers and horror films that channeled Spain’s unease. For example, see PopMatters’ reviews of Fata Morgana and Spanish Gothic cinema.
After Franco’s death in 1975, some leading filmmakers began shaking off the restrictions of censorship to discuss the previously undiscussable topics of sex, politics, religion, and violence. The thaw began gradually, but soon all bets were off. Such was the case with Iglesia and Isasi, who had already achieved box-office success with various thrillers.
By a curious coincidence, they both took it into their heads at the same time to make political parables in which a German shepherd is the main character, thus exposing the animal instincts barely repressed by human society. Let’s take the films in order.
The Creature/La Criatura (1977)
Directed by Eloy de la Iglesia
The Creature presents its opening credits with European high art. To the strains of baroque music, we see old-school paintings or tapestries, albeit with perverse subject matter, as women appear to be bitten by dogs. The film establishes itself by making a connection with the historical past, and the rest of it will relentlessly connect with Spain’s new political realities as right-wing forces try to resist the winds of democracy and social upheaval.
Our heroine is Cristina (Ana Belén), introduced in a scene with a doctor who informs her that she’s finally pregnant. She’s had a troubled marriage to Marcos (Juan Diego), the famous host of Spain’s most popular television variety show. He’s been carrying on with his brazen and “vulgar” co-host, Vicky (Claudia Gravi). As soon as Marcos hears of the imminent offspring, he’s sure their marital issues are over.
Cristina suffers a miscarriage after being frightened by a mangy dog in the ninth month of her pregnancy. The animal tries to attack her, and the owner swears he’s never done such a thing. Perhaps significantly, the owner runs a gas station on the highway. The gas station symbolizes capitalistic growth, dependency, and middle-class alleged prosperity; the tank must be forever refilled.
When Cristina and Marcos take a vacation by the sea, a handsome black German shepherd (played by Mickey III) attaches itself to Cristina, and the feeling is oddly mutual. The dog seems to have no owner, and they take it back to Madrid. Impulsively, she calls it Bruno, which is the name they were going to give their unborn son.
Marcos finds himself increasingly displaced by the dog, especially when he comes home to find Bruno lying in his place in bed next to Cristina and snarling over his territory. Marcos tries various stratagems, including a “present” for Bruno in the form of a white fluffy bitch who arouses Cristina’s jealousy.
Meanwhile, Marcos is being recruited by a Fascist party candidate for endorsement. The well-to-do crowd screams, “Franco! Franco!” Marcos uncomfortably and half-heartedly repeats the chant while Cristina stands silently, lightly clapping and radiating displeasure, trying to have it both ways. She’ll explain her privileged military upbringing to Bruno, and how she’s gone along with things while privately despising them and still taking advantage of them. She says, “You don’t understand what I’m saying, do you? That’s all right, Marcos wouldn’t understand either.”
Radio and television clips refer to points of turmoil, including the funerals in the January 1977 massacre of Atocha. The first act we see on Marcos’ variety show is a female ventriloquist whose dummies argue about their military experience and flamenco music; political and traditional ideas are put into the mouths of puppets. We also meet a Catholic priest who expounds on how wives are obligated to submit to their husbands’ desires at any time, as long as it’s for procreation.
Does The Creature indicate actual sexual congress between Cristina and Bruno, or is it simply that she finds his loyalty and friendship preferable to the unfaithful and social-climbing Marcos? Is there anything more than Bruno tickling her feet with his tongue? The film leaves this to our imagination. As filmmaker Gaspar Noé notes in his introduction, Iglesia’s film, as scripted by Enrique Barreiro, takes the whole situation as a soap opera of a love triangle in which one element happens to be a dog.
The Creature can be seen as a variation of Iglesia’s previous film, The Other Bedroom (La Otra Alcoba, 1976), in which the wife of a politically ambitious man named Marcos is unable to have a baby and begins casting her eye on a boy toy.
Iglesia specialized in cinema of sexual transgression from polite bourgeois restraints. In the same year as The Creature, he made Los Placeros Ocultos, wherein a closeted banker falls for a young hustler. The next year, The Deputy (El Diputado) places a similar dilemma in the hands of a married leftist politician in the closet. Iglesia was drawn to dramas of forbidden attraction.
The Creature is perhaps his oddest example, and he turns it into a quasi-fantastical escapist fantasy of liberation within privileged bourgeois contexts as Marcos rises politically on the wrong side. All of this makes the sometimes threatening Bruno an ambiguous symbol of whatever’s going on. The Fascist candidate refers to his opposition as barking dogs, but Bruno is capable of strong-arm tactics. In a sense, Cristina has always been in bed with Spain’s Fascism. Is she really eschewing it for Bruno, or is she deepening her personal isolation in a fascist context? This discreet but disturbing parable offers no simple answers.
Watch The Creature‘s age-restricted trailer on YouTube.
The Dog, aka A Dog Called Vengeance/El Perro (1977)
Directed by Antonio Isasi
Although packaged as A Dog Called Vengeance, Antonio Isasi’s film is called The Dog in the English credits, and that’s the exact translation of his Spanish title. El Perro. In this film, there’s not the slightest ambiguity about the dog’s politics. Trained to obey German commands issued by fascist soldiers, he’s a hundred percent their tool. Just to hammer it home, we’re told that the dictator of this unnamed South American country is nicknamed The Dog. The literal dog’s identification with the dictator will be sealed via cross-cut during the climax.
Although we won’t be given his name until late in the film, the hero of The Dog is university mathematician Aristides Ungria (Jason Miller), a political prisoner in a labor camp somewhere in the rural section of the unnamed country. (The film is shot in Spain and Venezuela.) Among Ungria’s fellow prisoners is another professor who knows the names of a cadre of revolutionaries, and he whispers the list to Ungria.
Ungria escapes and makes his way to the city and the revolutionaries, where he’s endangered by their internal politics. His primary adversary, however, is the trained guard dog who pursues him all the way and engages in several fights with him. During one of these, Ungria is stark naked after swimming in a river. During another encounter, he’s disguised as a priest. That’s a significant detail, not only because a revolutionary priest is one of the characters, but also because of Miller’s most famous role.
When Miller agreed to star in The Dog, he was known to the world as Father Damien Karras in The Exorcist (1973), the horror blockbuster directed by William Friedkin and written by William Peter Blatty. He starred in that film in the same year he won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for writing a hit Broadway play, That Championship Season. He was arguably at the high point of his career, and Antonio Isasi scored a real coup in casting him as the unlikely action hero of such a physical and political film.
Another casting coup was Lea Massari, the Italian star who’d made a reputation working with directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Louis Malle,and the Taviani Brothers. She appears only briefly in the last act of The Dog as Ungria’s former lover, but she’s billed second. The renowned Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem, who had spent time in prison under Franco, appears as one of the activists, and his casting links the Franco era to the post-Franco transition in cinema.
A more striking role goes to Marisa Paredes, probably best known for working with Pedro Almodóvar. She plays a gun-toting revolutionary in The Dog, and this is part of her “eight-year love story” with Isasi, as she discusses in a bonus segment on the Blu-ray. Their daughter,María Isasi, is also interviewed.
The Dog is a vigorous, sometimes brutal film of action and suspense; Isasi promises the viewer that no animals were harmed, and we trust no humans were either. The screenplay by Isasi and Juan Antonio Porto, from a novel by popular and prolific Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa, manages to be politically smart and complex while delivering the goods with guns and dogs. One of Isasi’s cleverest stylistic touches is presenting certain shots from a distorted, subjective “dog’s eye view”. In some markets, it got sold as a post-Jaws tale of animal survival, conveniently overlooking the loaded political themes.
Ángel Sala, programmer of the Sitges Film Festival, compares the violence to Sam Peckinpah and the abstract tone of existential political parable to Joseph Losey’s Figures in a Landscape (1970), shot in Spain. Salas helped make a science-fiction remake of The Dog in Brian Yuzna’s Rottweiler (2004).
Sala also says The Dog, released in Spain in December 1977, was by far the year’s most popular release with audiences. The film is an obviously explosive political allegory of dictators in general and Franco in particular, and it combines political terror and violence with flashes of nudity and sex. For these reasons, The Dog wasn’t destined for obvious success, but Isasi’s gambits paid off.
Today, The Dog remains a grueling and exciting spectacle. The Blu-ray presents a print with English credits, and we cag the film in English or Spanish. Since Miller delivers his lines in English and there’s not much dialogue anyway, I recommend the English soundtrack; it also has a more natural ambiance. Like The Creature, The Dog has been scanned in 2K from the original negative and looks excellent.
Watch A Dog Called Vengeance‘s age-restricted trailer on YouTube.