Rehearsal for a Crime

Luis Bunuel's Ensayo de un Crimen (1955) (aka The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz), starring Ernesto Alonso, Miraslava Stern, and Rita Macedo, was one of the three masterpieces of Mexican cinema that he made while living in Mexico City, along with Los Olvidados (1950) and El (1953). While Alonso, who had appeared in Bunuel’s Abismos de Pasion (Wuthering Heights) in 1954, went on to a long career in Mexican television production, the female leads met more tragic fates. Like Bunuel, the Czech-born Miraslava Stern (who was doubled in the movie by an exact replica mannequin that she, oddly, exchanged clothes and underwear with in one scene) fled the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s. Most of her adult life was spent in Mexico, where she dated bullfighters in real life and appeared in The Brave Bulls with Anthony Quinn in 1951 as well as the documentary Torero (released 1956). She committed suicide just days before Ensayo de un Crimen's premier in 1955. Rita Macedo, who was once married to the writer Carlos Fuentes, committed suicide two days before her 68th birthday in 1993.Typical for Bunuel, the film’s obsessions recalled themes he addressed twenty years earlier and predicted those he would address twenty years later. Rehearsal for a Crime updated the particular coitus interruptus of L’Age d’Or (1930), where the consummation of two lovers’ desires were continually thwarted by the conventions of religion, middle-class society, and the state, into a kind of murderus interruptus for lead actor Alonso, whose childhood fantasy-memories of murder were rekindled by the discovery of his mother’s long lost music box. Similarly, the double flashback structure (almost none of the movie takes place in real time) brings to mind the I-had-a-dream-within-another-character’s-dream configuration of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). Not only does the preoccupied, wealthy Alonso serve as a prototype of the Fernando Rey character of Tristana (1970) and Cet Obscur Objet du Desir (1977), but the leg that breaks away from the Miroslava Stern mannequin is undoubtedly the origin of the prosthetic leg that Catherine Deneuve later wore in Tristana (and which Hitchcock raved about). An often-overlooked homage in this movie was the music box and its diabolically sweet tune that announces the arrival of the murderous impulse in Archibaldo de la Cruz, much as Bunuel’s idol Fritz Lang used the Peer Gynt whistle for Peter Lorre’s character in M (1931). Ensayo de un Crimen is typical of Bunuel’s Mexican movie career in many other ways—low budgets, small production companies, familiar obsessions, and a cast, crew, and source material with which he had worked before—including cinematographer Augustin Jimenez who had filmed El Bruto (1953) and Abismos de Pasion (1954) and novelist Rudolfo Usigli who had written the books on which Susana (1951) and Una Mujer Sin Amor (1952) were based. Bunuel’s Mexican films seemed to infuse, if not undermine, European social realism by his reliance on dream imagery, sexual obsession, and de-romanticized lead characters. His social-surrealist influence on New York street photography can be seen in the work of Helen Levitt, who worked with Bunuel during the filming Los Olvidados and returned to the United States with the wonderful book Mexico City. Her later work maintained a sort of surrealist nod to the playfulness and wretchedness of children.