Cinema: Spanish Passion

The Moment of Truth, made in Spain with an Italian-language sound track, charts the rise and fall of a great bullfighter in terms of bitter economic necessity. The hero is played by Spanish Matador Miguel Mateo, 26, known to aficionados as Miguelin, who gives the role a surly, feverish immediacy that sometimes lacks subtlety but never lacks sting. The quasi-fictional Miguelin has no dream of glory at the outset. A spunky, mop-topped Andalusian peasant, he flees the arduous life on his father’s farm, drifts into that gypsy band of hot-eyed hopefuls who haunt every Spanish bull ring, courting fame with a scarlet muleta. Before a bull’s horns end his short unhappy career, he attains wealth, loneliness, a retinue of greedy hangers-on, a house for his mother, a fast convertible and faster women—one a sleek, actressy adventuress named Linda, who takes her matadors at their peak, and is played, in a brief and startlingly persuasive performance, by Linda Christian. Moment gives this conventional plot the classic simplicity of folk art. Gianni di Venanzo’s vibrant color photography uncovers the temper of Spain among black-hooded worshipers at a religious festival, among whores and homosexuals in the slums of Barcelona, in the face of a proud old taskmaster whose dingy urban cellar houses a school for stripling toreros. In one sequence, the disconsolate Miguelin wanders through a sere, light-washed Spanish landscape while threshers fill the air with a blizzard of pale yellow grain. Such scenes are a needed respite from many matchless closeups at the arena where the hero, his mouth pursed in a kiss of defiance, struts arrogantly before the bulls, finally coaxes his frothing and bloodied adversaries to die at his feet. Though Italian Director Francesco Rosi intends a social protest against a contest in which both man and beast are sacrificed to the mob, he instead brings forth a fi’m of brutal and paralyzing beauty, quickened with all the ancient, raging instincts that make a deadly art endure.