Víctor Erice rose to international prominence when he directed El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) in 1973. Ten years later he directed El sur (The South), which was adapted from a novella written by his wife, Adelaida García Morales. The latter film concerns “a young girl’s passage from innocence to knowledge, from childhood to adulthood” in the context of social divisions which characterise post‐civil war Spain.
Thomas Deveny’s book is a study of Spanish films produced since the mid‐1960s, which were based on fiction written after the civil war. The analyses appear under alphabetically‐arranged names of 56 authors, and range in length from a single page to 35 pages on films derived from the writings of Miguel Delibes (born 1920). The writer who is most widely known outside his homeland is Camilo José Cela (born 1916), whose novels La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942) and La colmena (1951) were turned into very successful films in 1975 and 1982, respectively. Professor Deveny takes the death of Franco in 1975 to be a “turning point” for Spanish cinema and for Spanish society in general. During the Franco years the founder of a Catholic pressure group described cinema as “the greatest calamity that has befallen the world since Adam”.
Historias del Kronen (Stories from the Kronen Bar, 1994) is about Spain’s “Generation X”. Las edades de Lulú (Lulu’s Ages, 1989) seems to be what now tends to be called an “erotic thriller”, with a moralising ending tagged on. Sinatra (1988) is not actually about Frank but about a fictional singer called Antonio who is “down on his luck” and hangs around with other “lost souls” (one of Sinatra’s personae). Among the monochrome stills is one of Terence Stamp, who starred alongside Patsy Kensit in Beltenebros (1990). The analyses are often very detailed, and pay particular attention to relations between cinematic treatment and literary source. In his introduction and an endpiece entitled “Twice‐Told Tales” the author reflects on the complicated relationship between films and novels in general, and on recent trends and themes in screen adaptations in Spain. Among the material at the back of the book are a chronology and bibliography of the adapted narratives, a filmography, and a list of secondary writings cited.
The book is as sturdily bound as any other Scarecrow Press production. I noticed some typographical anomalies (more than one line of type ends with the initial letter of a word, and two lines at the foot of p. 272 are repeated at the top of p. 273). El sur won acclaim in spite of the fact that for financial reasons it was released in an unfinished state; Professor Deveny suggests that the film’s unresolved ending is quite appropriate.
