Hypertextual and intermedial paths between the journalistic story and the
cinematographic ction: from the crime of Mazarrón to
El extraño viaje
Derroteros hipertextuales e intermediales entre el relato periodístico y la cción
cinematográca: del crimen de Mazarrón a El extraño viaje
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July-December of 2024
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
How to cite this article:
Gómez García, C. (2024). Hypertextual and intermedial paths between the journalistic story and the cinematographic ction: from the crime of
Mazarrón to
El extraño viaje
.
Doxa Comunicación
, 39, pp. 335-352.
https://doi.org/10.31921/doxacom.n39a2057
Concepción Gómez García.
Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Corporate Communication at the
Rey Juan Carlos University of Madrid (URJC) and teacher in the Master of Interactive Media and Multimedia Journalism
at the University of Granada (UGR). With a degree in Journalism from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM)
and a PhD in Journalism and Audiovisual Communication from the Carlos III University (UC3M), she is the author of
numerous articles and books on Spanish cinema. Among her lines of research, it must be highlighted the study of the
relationship between the chronicle of events and cinematographic ction, with articles in scientic Journals such as
“From the press to the myth: (Re)readings and (Re)updatings of quinqui cinema in Spain, in
Historia y Comunicación
Social
(2023); “Victims and executioners: the representation of the death penalty in Spanish cinema.” In
Signa. Revista
de la Asociación Española de Semiótica
(2020), “e chronicle of criminal events in journalistic and cinematographic
discourse. Edgar Neville's journey between Fuencarral and Bordadores streets”, in
Signa. Revista de la Asociación Es
-
pañola de Semiótica
(2011). Her doctoral thesis
e chronicle of events in Spanish cinema
(1912-1982), was published in
the uc3m open repository and she also author of the chapter “e chronicle of events in Spanish cinema”, in
Ficciones
Históricas,
in Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográcas (1999).
University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
[email protected]
ORCID:
0000-0001-8293-2474
is content is published under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License. International License CC BY-NC 4.0
Received: 30/08/2023 - Accepted: 16/10/2023 - Early access: 15/01/2024 - Published: 01/07/2024
Recibido: 30/08/2023 - Aceptado: 16/10/2023 - En edición: 15/01/2024 - Publicado: 01/07/2024
Abstract:
Journalism has always been a rich breeding ground for audiovisual
stories, but throughout much of the history of Spanish cinema,
recognition of the generic label that “based on real events” implies
has not been common. Being aware of the diculties that arise when
approaching a canonical work of Spanish cinema such as
El extraño
viaje
(Fernando Fernán-Gómez, 1964) from this perspective, the
purpose of this research is to carry out a comparative study of the
transfer that is produced from the narrative journalistic report of the
Mazarrón crime (an event that occurred in January 1956) and the
ctional account of its lm adaptation. is comparative analysis
Resumen:
El periodismo siempre ha sido un rico vivero de historias para el audio
-
visual, pero no ha sido común a lo largo de buena parte de la historia
del cine español el reconocimiento a la etiqueta genérica que implica
el “basado en hechos reales”. Conscientes de las dicultades que se pre
-
sentan para abordar desde esta perspectiva una obra canónica del cine
español como es El Extraño viaje (Fernando Fernán-Gómez, 1964), el
propósito de esta investigación es realizar un estudio comparatista del
trasvase que se produce desde el relato periodístico del caso en el que se
sustenta (el crimen de Mazarrón, un suceso ocurrido en enero de 1956)
y el relato ccional de su adaptación fílmica, analizando cómo se pro
-
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<p>[Enlace de URL / hc (has AS)]</p>
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1. Introduction
It is not dicult to realize the historiographical relevance that a lm like
El extraño viaje
(Fernando Fernán-Gómez, 1964) has
acquired in recent decades. e lm, which was condemned to silence by Franco’s ocialdom and premiered in a marginal
way in a neighborhood cinema ve years after it was made, has become over time not only one of the canonical works of
Spanish cinema but also one of the fundamental pieces to understand the professional career of the Madrilenian director
Fernán-Gómez. In this process of academic “recovery” and “vindication” of both the author and his lmography, numerous
studies have proliferated since the last years of the 20th century, focusing their analysis (in the case of this lm) either on the
use of the
esperpento
or black humor as hallmarks of the story (Angulo, Llinás, 1993; Téllez, 1997; Zunzunegui, 2009; Gómez,
2009; Castro de Paz, 2010; Cueto, 2010), or addressing the contemporary cinematographic inuences to which the lm is
indebted (Lorenzo, Kateryn, Izquierdo, 2009) or even analyzing the conception and structure of the work from the postulates
of fundamental theorists and authors such as Mijaíl Bajtín, Charles Baudelaire or Pedro Salinas (Zunzunegui, Aranzubía,
2023). e diversity and depth of these approaches have made it possible not only to unravel the singularity of the lm within
the Spanish cultural tradition, but also to demonstrate the dialogue that the lm maintained with other elds that were far
removed from the cinema of those years, such as the traces that Solana’s black paintings left in his work or the intrusion into a
terrain as little explored at the time as that of transvestism.
is interesting and overabundant academic literature lacks, however, an analytical perspective that is particularly necessary
and fundamental for us to understand this work in its full dimension. e aim is to analyze the relationship of this lm with
the real journalistic event from which it is based, a lurid crime that occurred in the Murcian town of Mazarrón in January 1956.
erefore, the purpose of this article is to explore further and analyze the lm from the generic label “based on real events”
1
,
events recreated by the lmmaker which turn out to be factual stories, coming directly or indirectly from the newspapers,
a mediating link that is usually ignored when mentioning the referent (“real facts”) as the inspiration for lmic ction. As a
1
e category “based on real events” is the most widespread or common in the adaptation of events that appeal to reality in the eld of cinematographic ction.
Other labels (the true stories common in Anglo-Saxon cinema) or subgenres such as “biopic”, “true crime”, “instant movies” or historical cinema itself could not
be applicable to the case at hand.
assesses how this transfer occurs, what are the traces of the event from
which it derives and what existing documentary references, if any, are
recorded in the lm credits. We will see how
El extraño viaje
stands
as a paradigmatic example of invisibility and erasure of the factual
criminal story from which it comes, forced, among other reasons, by
some interferences of reality imposed by the Franco´s regime.
Keywords:
Journalism; Spanish Cinema; chronical of criminal events; based on a
true story;
El extraño viaje.
duce esa posible transferencia, cuáles son las huellas del suceso del que
parte y qué referencias documentales existentes, si las hubiera, se regis
-
tran en los créditos del lme. Comprobaremos cómo El extraño viaje se
erige en un ejemplo paradigmático de invisibilidad y borrado del relato
factual criminal del que procede, obligado, entre otras razones, por unas
interferencias de lo real que imponía el régimen franquista.
Palabras clave:
Periodismo; Cine español; crónica de sucesos criminales; basado en he
-
chos reales; El extraño viaje.
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matter of fact, the newspaper is an exceptional provider of what Genette called “factual narration” in its modality “account
of current events” (Genette, 1990). We should not forget either that this particular category of ctional cinema does not fail
to incorporate some textual mechanisms of the documentary, displacing the pragmatic pact with the spectator “subtly but
irreversibly, thanks to a simple `based on’, and the space in which the spectator is no longer to be placed is that of purely
ctional autonomy, but that of a pseudoheteronomy in which the ctional narrative is sheltered behind a prediscursive
outside” (Carrera, Talens, 2018: 140).
We consider especially pertinent, in any case, the proposal of the above-mentioned master of French narratology around the
fact that factual narrative and ctional narrative behave dierently with respect to the story they “report” by the mere fact that
this story is (supposedly) “true” in one case and invented in another one. But as Genette argued, this “supposedly” alludes to
the fact that historians sometimes invent details or compose intrigues and novelists sometimes draw inspiration from actual
events. “
What counts here is the ocial status of the text and its Horizon of reading
” (Genette, 1990: 756, 757) (italics added).
If in the eld of ctional narrative, both literary and audiovisual, the existing literature in terms of discourse analysis in its
dierent modalities is abundant and enjoys a secular tradition in the case of literature and a considerable corpus in the case
of cinema, the literature focused on informative analysis tends to omit what we could call the “semiotic process”, the meaning-
generating narrative artifacts, the “dialectical moment” as understood by Schopenhauer, sticking essentially to an analysis-
summary of manifest contents on a given topic or to an analysis of the dierent journalistic genres. Perhaps this is due to the
fact that, in the case of the journalistic account, this is usually projected on a horizon of “transparency”, as a specular reection
of the facts, and the “meaning” is not usually clearly separated from the referent in the critical and analytical discourse.
ere is thus a vast eld of study, virgin in many respects, in the eld of the informative account to try to “extract a principle
of classication and a focus of description from the apparent anarchy of messages” (Barthes, 2009: 216). Hence, after having
noted the substantial imbalance existing between the scarce analytical literature focused on the forms and structures of the
journalistic narrative aimed at “making it seem true” (we now leave aside the question of the eective will to be faithful to the
facts or their opposite, to betray them) o focus solely on “telling” as opposed to the rather more prolic analysis of the lmic
story, it is worth outlining briey the complex system of mediations that underlies the “based on real facts” approach and
therefore alluding, albeit very briey, to the thorny issue of “realism”. Barthes distinguished “realism” from “verisimilitude”
and alluded to the former as “any discourse that accepts enunciations accredited only by their referent” (1987:186). e key to
realism would lie, according to him, in “referential illusion”, which seeks to make us forget the tripartite mechanism of the sign:
signier-signied-referent, suppressing the signied to make us believe that what we agree to be real is reality itself.
It is also worthwhile to dwell on the core issue of this research: the transfers from journalism to cinema and its hypertextual
paths. Journalism has always been a rich nursery of stories for the audiovisual, but if we think that the dialogue between
cinema and literature has become, on many occasions, a kind of polemic combat between theorists and historians of both
elds, we can imagine the paths towards which the comparative work between the journalistic text and the lmic text would
lead. André Bazin advocated the impure condition of cinema and its intermediality with the other arts. In fact, journalism,
although not considered an art, forms a series of discursive practices that, although sometimes not far from literary non-
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ction writing, can be considered as a (macro)medium that in this case becomes part of the network of intermediate relations
from which the lm under study is nourished and in which it functions. Perhaps, by a kind of informational uke, the eect
of all the emphasis placed on concepts such as “truth”, “facts”, “objectivity” or “informative transparency”, classic descriptors
of journalistic activity, there has been a tendency to assimilate journalism more to “natura”, to the realm of the referent, rather
than to culture (the terrain of the story), neglecting the analysis of informative rhetoric and the construction of the imaginary
“based on real facts”, possibly suering some of the eects of that “spell of total empiricism” of which Adorno spoke in his
Aesthetic eory
.
In order to situate this “transtextual” relationship between journalistic and lmic narrative, we must refer, in the rst instance,
to a controversial question, a key issue in intermedia comparatism, such as that of literary adaptations. We understand that
adaptations are interpretations, rewritings that entail, necessarily and naturally, a process of intermediality, a series of decisions
that involve transformations or a transwriting of the source text (Gómez, Sánchez-Mesa, 2011: 280). ese transformations
(contextual or historical, discursive-enunciative, generic, of the fable, etc.) are partly the result of the “reading” or interpretation
of the rst text (t1) by the producers of the second text (t2) and partly the result of the demands of the lm medium or target
context to produce an acceptable lm according to the specicity or dominant codes of that medium. Here we also encounter
the old problem of “delity” to the “original”, a classic problem in the history of thought and in transtextual and intermedial
practices which, although generally discarded in the most recent theories, continues to weigh heavily on spectators.
If adaptations of literary works are often criticized for “betraying” or not honoring the original from which they start, this kind
of “indelities” seem hardly punishable in “adaptations” of journalistic texts because they are a ephemeral and, in them, the
concept of “authorship” is usually blurred. However, this does not imply giving up absolutely the concept of “delity” as an
analytical artifact, especially if interpreted in the terms that Umberto Eco used to interpret it: “the concept of delity has to
do with the conviction that translation is one of the forms of interpretation, and that it must always aim, even if it starts from
the sensibility and culture of the reader, to rediscover not only the author’s intention but also the intention of the text” (Eco,
2008:22).
However, we must be aware that, in those lms inspired by real events, the most complex thing is to identify that “original”
source text, because most often their scripts are the result of a diuse and disparate trickle of informative fragments that
sometimes leave their mark on the collective imagination. Transferring this informative story to the cinema screen is a dicult
weight to manage successfully when a director imposes himself delity to the news referent, regardless of the possible “truth”
or falsehood in which the journalistic story may incur. is approach was very common in denunciation lms that emerged in
the eighties, such as
El caso Almería
(Pedro Costa, 1984) or
Matar al Nani
(Roberto Bodegas, 1988), although it was used by the
lm’s promoters as an added value to sell the lm.
Another aspect that conditions both the process of lm construction and the subsequent development of a lm “based on
real events” is what we could call “interference of the real”, a very relevant aspect in this type of productions. Let us remember,
for example, that the participation (against payment) of the three executioners who participated in
Queridísimos verdugos
(B.
Martín Patino, 1977) was decisive for the strength and credibility of the lm, or that the support of Santiago Corella’s family was
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fundamental for the making of
Matar al Nani
, as they consider it an act of public denunciation of the rst case of a disappeared
person in the Spanish democracy, while at the same time it provided peace of mind and legal security for the lm’s producers.
Although this is a far-reaching subject, impossible to develop at greater length in these pages, other examples of these
“interferences with the real” lead us to refer to the case of
Las Hurdes/Tierra sin pan
, by Luis Buñuel, banned by the conservative
forces of the Spanish Republic after its premiere at the Palacio de la Prensa in Madrid in 1933 because it was considered an
attack on the image of that region. In the lm we are considering here,
El extraño viaje
, its title was adopted after the Minister
of Information and Tourism expressly prohibited the authorization of the rst title of the lm,
El crimen de Mazarrón
, to
avoid damaging the good tourist image that was growing in that area of Spain. On November 27, 1964, the Civil Governor and
Provincial head of the Movement in Murcia, wrote a letter to Manuel Fraga requesting his help to suppress the title
El crimen de
Mazarrón
“of a lm that will soon be released” reminding him of “the praiseworthy eort of private companies that have very
respectable interests in the town” and “the extraordinary tourist possibilities of the area”. Fraga responded with another letter
on December 9, reassuring the Civil Governor that the Board of Censorship had already adopted the agreement to prohibit the
title, “so the whole matter would be settled without major problems or resources”
2
. is “interference” on the part of the State
to force the creators to eliminate the reference to the crime was decisive for the invisibility of the news referent and the erasure
of the traces of the real event not only in the title of the lm but also in the lm’s credits.
It is also worth remembering that César González Ruano praised this decision in
ABC
, in an article written from Cuenca where
the famous journalist spent his summer vacations and from where he recalled that “that city still has to suer the lightness of
a comedian (...) who made famous a crime that seems never to have existed”, arguing that the town of Mazarrón, very favored
by tourism, “would have faced an uncomfortable label which would have brought who knows how many silly annoyances, and
how many years it would have taken to get rid of them”
3
. e journalist and writer from Madrid could not have imagined then
the controversy that a couple of decades later would surround Pilar Miró’s lm
El crimen de Cuenca
(1980), which recreated
an event that was indeed real.
Finally, it is important to highlight another characteristic that denes an important part of the Spanish lm corpus “based on
real events”, which is the lack of recognition for these lms of the very origin of these stories. If in North American cinema this
formula has been used without ambiguity, the famous true stories, or its variant true crime
4
, in Spain, during almost the entire
twentieth century, there are few lmmakers who include in their credits that their work refers to a criminal event and even fewer
are those who recognize the authorship of journalistic sources. Perhaps one of the reasons for this “disdain” for the reference
“real events” is due to the negative connotations that for decades have dragged the chronicle of events in our country (seen as
2
General Archive of the Administration, box 36/0486, exp. 31812.
3
“Las etiquetas”, CGR,
ABC
, 30/8/1964, p. 59.
4
is literary genre, also highly popular in contemporary non-ction cinema, has become in recent decades one of the most successful attractions for platforms
such as
HBO
,
Amazon Prime
or
Netix
with productions, for example, such as those that document or ctionalize the cases of Ted Bundy or Jerey Dahmer. In
the case of Spain, documentaries and docuseries such as
Muerte en León
(Movistar+, 2016),
Lo
que la verdad esconde: el caso Asunta
(Antena 3, 2017) or
El caso
Alcàsser
(Netix, 2019), to give just a few examples, have invigorated a genre that has also extended to the sound format of podcasting.
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a journalistic exercise surrounded by truculence and sensationalism), in addition to the censorship restrictions that suocated
lmmakers. is trend was broken in the late eighties, when lmmakers like Pedro Costa (previously a crime reporter and
investigative journalist in dierent media) made the leap to lmmaking and directed, among other works, the television series
La huella del crimen
(TVE), one of the “ctions that forged the new symbolic imaginaries” on television (Palacio, 2006:317),
eliminating the misgivings and prejudices towards the chronicle of events and giving way to a more normalized production in
this territory both in cinema and on the small screen.
2. Methodology
e methodology used in this research proposes as a fundamental ground a number of primary documentary sources: the
municipal newspaper library of Madrid and the National newspaper library. Our inquiry there looked for knowledge of the
informative coverage of the event in four selected journalistic media: the daily
Madrid
, the weekly
El Caso
and the local
newspapers
La Verdad
of Murcia, and
El Noticiero de Cartagena
in the dates between January 16 and 28, 1956. is selection
has allowed us to oer both the journalistic coverage made by a national newspaper that was in full commercial expansion,
as well as the journalistic treatment given in the local press. Obviously, we could not forget in this selection
El Caso
, the only
publication specialized in the treatment of the chronicle of events that, although it had been in circulation for only four years
by then, was already beginning to achieve great popularity among readers.
In order to carry out our research, it was also necessary to analyze the censorship le of the lm, available in the General
Archive of the Administration, Culture section, in order to compare the data that could have aected the plot and the making
of the lm, such as the express prohibition to use in the title the reference to the crime of Mazarrón. e process is completed
with the analysis of
El extraño viaje
, a lm about which Fernán-Gómez himself stated that it did not intend to narrate that
criminal event, but whose viewing will allow us to essay a comparative study of the transfer from the journalistic story to the
ctional story. We want to check how this transfer takes place, what are the traces of the event from which it starts and what
existing documentary references, if any, are recorded in the lm’s credits. Likewise, we will identify the transformations to
which the stories and factual references are subjected, pointing out what may be the meaning of the additions or developments
introduced by the scriptwriters and the lmmaking team.
To test that we will try to demonstrate is that
El extraño viaje
contains decisive elements coming from the journalistic
information about this criminal case, fundamental in the narrative construction of this singular story from the moment in
which real data and facts have been “used” and processed by the scriptwriter in a number of important elements that are more
relevant than what has been previously recognized in dierent academic approaches to this lm (María, 2009 or Zunzunegui,
1993, among others).
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3. A “sensational” event jumps to the pages of newspapers
To contextualize the object of study, let us recall, in a synthetic way, the main lines of the proven facts of this crime: on a lonely
beach, a few kilometers from the port of Mazarrón, a young sherman nds the corpse of a distinguished-looking woman
wearing a fur coat and underwear. A few meters away, the body of a man lies face down in the sand. On a rock there is a bottle
and three empty glasses, as well as a series of clothes laid out to dry, such as a corset from a lingerie shop in Ávila, a man’s
coat and a woman’s fur coat, with the label of a famous furrier’s shop in the center of Madrid. e discovery took place early
in the morning of January 15, 1956, and in that rst search by the Benemérita (the Spanish Civil Guard) 1,700 pesetas (a very
considerable amount for the time) were found in the 3 pocket of the gentleman’s suit, besides 200 pesetas that the lady was
carrying in her coat.
e
Madrid
newspaper reports the rst data on the strange appearance of two bodies on the Cueva de los Lobos beach, near
Mazarrón, on January 16, 1956. ey are a man and a woman who “could not be identied (… ) although they are elegantly
dressed”
5
. In the edition of the 17th and 18th, the information published by this newspaper continues to be that provided by
the
Cifra
agency. It is included that next to the bodies there was a copy of the
Nueva Rioja
newspaper from the year 53, and the
statement of a taxi driver who took a man and two women from Cartagena to the port of Mazarrón is recorded. According to
this information, the interest of the strangers was to rent a house to rest for a few days, so two women got into the car: a younger
one, who was carrying a briefcase that she did not want to get rid of, another older woman, and a man. It seems that during
the journey “they neither exchanged impressions nor spoke at all, the driver noticing that the older woman, who was next to
him, refused to let him look at her face, so she pretended to be sleeping or looking out the window.” e story continues in the
third person, and although it still does not include textual statements from the taxi driver, it reports that the driver “noticed
something strange, since they had passed several towns and they did not tell him where to stop,” so he stopped the car and
“told the travelers that he would not continue until they told him where they were going”. ey ordered him to return to a road
already traveled, and shortly after, they ordered him to stop, paid him the cost of the trip, and “stayed in the middle of the eld,
close to the beach.” e information closes with two important pieces of information: the analyzed remains of the cup were
“arsenic” and the unknown persons had died twenty-four hours before the discovery on the beach
6
.
e new data reveal that, of the two women, the younger was “tall, beautiful, somewhat plump and had her hair dyed auburn”.
About the oldest, the missing one, it is said that “it can be assumed that her body lays at the bottom of the sea or locked up in
one of the small hotels on the Island or surrounding beaches”. It is also added that “the corpse of the youngest woman still has
a diamond ring on, and the man has a wristwatch stopped at quarter to ten because it got wet”, which leads them to think that
“the death probably occurred about ten minutes earlier”
7
.
e news turn of the newspaper occurs the next day, January 19, when the correspondent in Murcia takes the reins and gives
the news a more literary bias. e reporter Francisco Capote Macía highlights that investigation is led by “the competent judge
of Totana, Mr. Gabriel González Aguado, eectively supported by the zeal of the Civil Guard and Police forces,” and points out
another very interesting fact for our investigation, because the theme of transvestism plays a fundamental role in Fernando
Fernán-Gómez’s lm. It is the following comment: “As for the other woman (whom the popular imagination, overowing with
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a torrent of assumptions, passed o as a man) is also the sister of the dead, her name is Marina and is fty-two years old.” On
January 25,
Madrid
publishes that the thesis that the brothers did not commit suicide seems to be conrmed, but they were
rather murdered (note that the word “crime” has not appeared in any of the chronicles) and that “even Marina, the sister
searched with fruitless results until today, also perished”, justifying the fact that if the body was not found it was because “the
sea always returns its victims, but never the victims of others”
8
.
e news coverage carried out by the local press is particularly interesting for journalistic analysis because these media try to
minimize the issue, avoiding to give it the dimension that such a unique event in a small town deserves and hiding it as if it
were a shame. We will have to wait two days after the discovery of the bodies for
La Verdad
of Murcia to take to its rst page
9
the appearance of the bodies and the mystery surrounding their identity in a column on the right without a photograph.
Inside, on page 7, accompanied by a miscellany of various types of information, it aseptically addresses the basic data of the
event without taking up a large space. e next day no information was oered, while on the 19th only a brief on the cover was
given (without referring to the one on the inside) in which the identity of the dead was reported. e economic situation of the
Pérez Gómez brothers in Haro, the town where they came from and where they were considered “honorable” people, is part
of a chronicle by the correspondent in Logroño that is published on the 20th
10
. e information details that the three brothers
“lived a very retired life, like true misanthropes, being very unsociable in their relationships”, to conclude that “fteen days ago
they left without leaving any address”, all of which were decisive elements in the construction of the characters of ction. For
La
Verdad
, the “Case of the ree Cups”, as they called it (never as the “Crime of Mazarrón”), the event continued to have a more
than discreet presence, almost trying to make the matter go unnoticed. Information will not be published every day, it will not
delve too deeply into the data collected in the area around the town and at no time it was accompanied by photographs that
illustrated the area where the bodies or the deceased were located.
is way of journalistic covering of an event that was clearly uncomfortable is even more evident in
El Noticiero de Cartagena
,
an afternoon newspaper whose circulation never exceeded three thousand copies. e newspaper does not give information
about the case until January 20 and also places it on its last page. e information, which is not signed, is a story based on
rumors, written without rigor or professional ethics. As an example, the comments oered about Marina, the missing sister:
.“it can also even be conjectured that she is dead, and this with a greater chance of success, drowned by other people who put
weight on the corpse, since it is well known that, otherwise, the sea returns its dead after three days”
11
.
Radically dierent is the information display carried out by the weekly newspaper specialized in events,
El Caso
. For two
consecutive editions, the publication directed by Eugenio Suárez
12
dedicates separate covers and a good number of pages
8
Madrid
, 25/1/1956, p. 17.
9
La Verdad
, 20/1/1956, front page.
10
La Verdad
, 20/1/1956, front page.
11
El Noticiero de Cartagena
, 20/1/1956, back cover.
12
Let us remember that the creator of
El Caso
, Eugenio Suárez, Falangist and volunteer of the Blue Division, had begun his professional career as a correspondent
for the Movement’s press in Budapest. After returning to Madrid to his position as censor, he became a sta editor of the
Madrid
newspaper in 1949. ree years
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inside
13
. In the edition corresponding to January 21, the newspaper illustrates its cover with the portraits drawn by the
cartoonist Pinedo about the two deceased brothers. Its headline “Tragedy on Mazarrón Beach” accompanies a brief text in
which the event is described as “mystery of the year” and argues why its rst page does not use photographic illustration: “our
cover reproduces the portraits by Julio and Luisa Pérez Gómez, since we consider those obtained post-mortem unpublishable
and in bad taste for our readers.”
After this deference, the inside pages convey the information provided by the special correspondent to Murcia and La Rioja.
Photographs of the place where the bodies were found are published, as well as of the sherman José Rodríguez Navarro, the
driver Rivas and drawings of the bottle and glasses. e information published in its pages is meticulous, it focuses on the
smallest details and does not lack some literary aspect framing its chronicles. It places Puerto de Mazarrón as one of the main
summer centers of our coast, describing its natural riches, its blue waters, its happy tourists who come attracted by its beauty
and tranquility, guaranteed by the almost total lack of means of communication. e detailed description of where we are,
what its people are like and what their intentions are is accompanied by the basic data of the case discovered in the rst hours.
El Caso
also displays continuous praise for the law enforcement forces and the need to “publicly express our gratitude to all
the authorities that take part in clarifying these events, for their kind assistance, which has facilitated our informative work”
14
.
e pages of this edition include interviews with the taxi driver, Rivas Bascón, and two women (mother and daughter) who
spoke with the strangers because they were looking for rental houses. e driver conrms that one of the people who traveled
in his vehicle was “a man disguised as a woman.” On the trip to the beach, the driver was surprised by the silence among the
three brothers and the order not to turn on the interior light of the car when they were going to pay him in the middle of the
road. e three strangers were lost in the darkness of the night, in the middle of nowhere. “I was surprised by the absolute
silence of the women. e oldest, in particular, sat in Cartagena next to me, bowed her head, held her hands between her
knees, and didn’t move during the entire trip! I have heard the assumption that it could be a man disguised as a woman, which
does not seem entirely impossible to me”
15
.
e report continues with information collected from Haro by special correspondents to this town. From there, the chronicle
begins with a grandiloquent tone when it explains to readers that “our news teams, after dierent eorts in Madrid and
Logroño, were able to learn the sensational news that, through masterful investigative work, the Civil Guard post of the city
of Haro had managed to identify the characters of the enigmatic drama”. After providing the identities of Julio Pérez Gómez,
single, native of Haro, aged sixty-three, and Luisa Pérez Gómez, also single and fty-seven years old, the information conrms
that the missing woman is their sister, Marina, also single and sixty years old.
later he managed to get the general director of Press, Juan Aparicio, to give him the necessary support for the creation of the weekly events newspaper.
13
El Caso
nº 194, 21/1/ 1956, front page and pp. 2-5, y nº 195, de 28/1/1956, front page and pp. 2-6.
14
is reference will be common in the journalistic style of the events weekly throughout its existence.
15
El Caso
, n º 194, p. 4.
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e journalistic story establishes Pérez Gómez´s itinerary since they left Haro, on January 9, on the express train heading to
Madrid, to continue to Murcia. ey traveled in rst class, carrying several suitcases and dressed in elegant clothes, which
matched those worn by the corpses. e chronicle investigates the origin of its protagonists: a respectable and wealthy family
that in past times “shined” for their social position. e parents, Valentín and Higinia, had owned a large estate and the
Higinia Hotel, which was attended by “a large and distinguished clientele.” When their parents died, the brothers divided the
inheritance (with one more sister who lives in Haro and is the widow of the former mayor), transferred the hotel, settled in
Bilbao, later in Madrid, and nally they returned to Haro due to health problems. From that moment on, “a silent war, very
much like the tortured characters of the Brontë writers, broke out within that family,” explains the chronicle, which is why
Consuelo (the other sister) separated from Marina, Luisa and Julio.
e three unmarried brothers were, according to the citizens of Haro consulted, “very strange.” Although their conduct was
impeccable, “they lived apart from everyone,” “voluntarily isolated,” “they spoke as little as possible with those they met and
knew.” ey lived in a beautiful apartment on one of the most important streets in the town and spent many hours “observing
the street and the people passing by” through the blinds, always drawn: “From the street you could sense the presence of the
three brothers on the other side of that kind of wall behind which they seemed to be hiding”
16
.
e special correspondent, who signs as C.H., assures, after interviewing a local merchant as well as other authorities, that
“the eldest sister, Marina, imposed her will and her whims on the other two siblings: Luisa and Julio.” “e people to whom
we allude (the paragraph continues) have assured us that there was a glimpse of “a pernicious, fatal inuence of the eldest
sister on the other two.” And under the heading “A dark story”, the information concludes with important data for our research,
because they will nd a lmic echo in Fernando Fernán-Gómez’s proposal. In the last column, the reporter writes: “a desire
for excessive isolation, a deliberate intention to remain closely united in an extravagant society of three: a closed silence in
the face of society, make our characters extravagant and sickly beings: heroes of the most shocking story of psychopaths. eir
death itself, shrouded in mystery, not only suggests, but would surpass any literary invention
17
.”
e following week,
El Caso
headlined on its cover “Mazarrón, the event of the year,” accompanying it with photographs of
the three brothers and an image of one of the boats that are combing the coastline in search of the missing body. Inside, eight
pages were dedicated to reporting the event from every angle and point of view imaginable. Faithful to its declared philosophy:
“we prefer to err on the side of detail rather than leave something in the pipeline that could serve for an exact understanding
of what happened”, the pages tried to answer the numerous unknowns that the case raises by stating their way of working (so
dierent from that of the local press, as we have seen) and their professional ethics: “We cannot, nor do we want to, because
our objectivity strictly prohibits us, speculate with rumors, the `it is said´, `it is assured´, which at every moment are launched
16
El Caso
, nº 194, 21/1/ 1956, p. 5.
17
El Caso
, nº 194, p. 5.
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and that only serve to disorient opinion, interfere with the delicate work of Justice and hinder the tenacious and constant trail
of investigators”
18
.
Although the reasons that led the Pérez Gómez brothers to leave Haro were never known with certainty, it is known that on
their trip to Mazarrón they made a pilgrimage through hotels, guesthouses and shops. e statements of those who saw them
give us interesting details, such as that “the lady dressed in black” (Marina) had a “manly appearance, she was rarely made
up”
19
, “she was always mute, somewhat apart while the other two acted, although it was she who carried the money”
20
. ey
also tell us that they bought the press (
El Noticiero
and the
Madrid
newspaper) and
espadrilles
21
(in the lm it was modern
clothing), or that they ate seafood in a restaurant.
e latest information pointed to a possible triple suicide of the brothers.
El Caso
announces the appearance of a letter written
and signed by the brothers that they send to some cousins who live in the town of Salinas de Añana in Álava. In the letter, in
a very aectionate tone, they inform that they have sent them all the furniture in their house, in addition to a suitcase from
Madrid, so that they can enjoy it in the most convenient way and add that they will undertake “a long trip abroad”, but that
“the itinerary is not yet determined”
22
. Despite this indication, no avenue of investigation is ruled out because there is even the
possibility that they were victims of a scam: “that of the hidden treasure that would come in a small boat”
23
. Whatever it was,
“e Case of the ree Cups” or “e Crime of Mazarrón” would begin to disappear from the pages of the newspapers with the
same mystery with which it had entered.
4. Results: journalistic transfers and adaptation to the ctional story
A fairly economical strategy in approaching the analysis of adaptations, including those of lms “based on real events,”
consists of asking a double question: “what is transferred and what is adapted?” (McFarlane, 1996), that is, which elements
of the original text (t1) are maintained in the adaptation (t2) and which are transformed or added by it. First, however, it is
important to contextualize the circumstances surrounding the production and making of
El extraño viaje
. Fernando Fernán-
Gómez embarked on the making of this lm after the commercial failure of the suocating
El mundo sigue
(1963), which, in
turn, constituted the closure of a common thread that began with the diptych
La vida por delante
(1958) and
La vida alrededor
(1959).
El mundo sigue
had experienced numerous setbacks with censorship because it was a sour work of melodramatic
blackness and insistence on portraying the miserable daily life of the most popular classes. In this lm, “visual and narrative
elements of the stylizing, distorting tradition of Spanish art with costumbrist, avant-garde and popular roots were already
18
El Caso
, nº195, p. 4.
19
El Caso
, nº195, p. 2.
20
El Caso
, op.cit, p. 3.
21
El Caso
, op.cit, p. 3.
22
El Caso,
nº 198, p. 14 and back cover.
23
El Caso
, op.cit, p. 7.
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combined, from Goya and Solana to Arniches and Valle-Inclán, from Gómez de la Serna to Jardiel Poncela, from Neville to
Azcona and Berlanga” (Castro de Paz: 2010, 217). is devastating portrait of Spanish society in the dark post-war period is the
cause, according to the director himself, of the “failure” of the lm (Brasó: 2002, 130). A lm, therefore, very uncomfortable for
the Franco administration,
El mundo sigue
was boycotted and banned
24
, so the lmmaker found himself, at the beginning of
1964, as he recounts in his
Memoirs
, in a catastrophic economic situation. As luck would have it, a newly created production
company, Impala, commissioned him to direct his next feature lm, a lm in which, for the rst time, he would not intervene
in the script (Fernán-Gómez: 1990, 467).
e new project has its origins in the Café Gijón in Madrid, a meeting and gathering place, where Luis García Berlanga, Pedro
Beltrán and Manuel Ruiz-Castillo, among others, met on an undetermined date in 1963. Among the “curious passions” of the
director of
El verdugo
was that of investigating mysterious crimes “as a source of ideas” for possible projects and it is he who
comments on the case of “a pair of mentally decient brothers who had been found on the beach of Mazarrón (...). en I came
up with the plot for a lm” (García Berlanga: 2009, 7). Screenwriter Pedro Beltrán explained that Berlanga’s comment that “the
old woman’s body was not discovered because they hid it in the town and the murderer left the place using his clothes and
disguised as a woman” seemed to him material enough for a lm “and I proposed to Luis to buy the idea” (F. Heredero: 2008,
94). For his part, the screenwriter Manuel Ruiz-Castillo recalled that that day the Valencian director read some clippings from
El Caso
recounting the crime and presented his particular theory about what happened: “the idea of the possible transvestism
of the murderer was ingenious, brilliant, and, as Luis said, there was a lm there, and he encouraged Pedro and me to think
about the idea and to start preparing a script” (Ruiz-Castillo: 2009, 63). Beltrán and Ruiz-Castillo begin to draft the plot, they
work on a rst treatment of the story that García Berlanga gives up directing and is oered to dierent production companies
until Impala Films oers them a contract to produce the script. Despite the good prospects that open up with the purchase of
the plot, the disagreements between the scriptwriters become so evident that Ruiz-Castillo decides to abandon the project,
leaving only Pedro Beltrán as scriptwriter
25
.
As we reviewed above, dierent studies have considered that
El extraño viaje
was based on an original script that referred
very vaguely to the Mazarrón crime. In such a way that “when it came to putting into images a proposal like the one oered by
Beltrán and Ruiz Castillo’s script, Fernán-Gómez’s work on it was, on the one hand, free of any public relationship with a pre-
existing text and, on the other hand, it was presented as an incitement to concentrate the creative weight, independent of any
responsibility with respect to a “canonical” text that had to be “adapted” (that is, “respected”) in the exploration, in the strict
terrain of the staging” (Zunzunegui, 1993: 52).
We cannot refer here to a “canonical” text and we must remember that the journalistic chronicle as a plot substrate has very
rarely been considered a rst-order element in Spanish cinema, but we can highlight the elements that “are transferred” in
24
e lm, which was nanced by the lmmaker himself, was never released in commercial theaters and could only be seen on screen when A contracorriente lm
distributed it in 2015.
25
Ruiz-Castillo appeared in the lm’s credits along with Pedro Beltrán as the author of the plot, based on an idea by Luis García Berlanga.
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this comparatist analysis between the factual terrain and the audiovisual ction. At the outset, it should be noted that these
elements are subject to one of the most valued creative ndings of the lm, which is linked to the artistic tradition of the
grotesque in this country: “the conguration of that family of single siblings who survive, isolated from the rest of the town
and prisoners of their obsessions” (Zunzunegui, 1993:52). Let us remember that journalistic information already portrayed the
siblings Marina, Luisa and Julio Pérez Gómez as three “extravagant”, “sickly” and “very strange” unmarried individuals, with
a withdrawn and unsociable character. Both in the informative story and later in the lm, the three belong to a respectable
family, they live in a beautiful house located in the center of a provincial town and they always spend hours a day observing the
street and the people through blinds down. Let us remember that the chronicle of
El Caso
alluded to the “excessive isolation”,
to “their closed silence in the face of society”, describing these brothers as “heroes of the most shocking story of psychopaths”,
with a mysterious death that “would surpass any invention of a literary type.” All of this is recreated in Fernán-Gómez’s work
of ction.
In the journalistic chronicle carried out from the Riojan town of Haro, the Pérez Gómez family’s place of residence, the weekly
El Caso
detailed the pernicious inuence of Marina on her brothers, on whom she imposes her will and her whims without
regard. is fact, an essential element in the relationship between the real siblings, would also be present and key in the
characters that Tota Alba (Ignacia), Rafaela Aparicio (Paquita) and Jesús Franco (Venancio) play in the ction. What the
inventiveness of the scriptwriters does is to adorn the personalities of these beings by giving them infantile traits in the case
of Paquita and Venancio, while Ignacia will reinforce her dictatorial function over her siblings with her physique and her
authoritarian gestures.
ere is also another element that we nd in the journalistic story and that will be of great relevance in the ctional plot:
the suspicion that during the trip to the beach the taller sister could be a man dressed as a woman. is issue was used as a
fundamental piece of the lm plot to expand on transvestism, an exotic and unique narrative proposal in the Spanish cinema
of the sixties, but which we can place in the “perverse” erotic imaginary of a certain dimension of Luis García Berlanga’s
humor. In this line of argument, the information in the journalistic chronicles alluding to the fact that “extravagant belongings”
were found next to the bodies that appeared on the beach, such as a corset, served the scriptwriter to develop a lm subplot
throughout the entire lm (the erotic games between Ignacia and her young lover, Fernando) to generate intrigue and reection
on the external manifestations in Spanish society.
Although the ending of the lm coincides with the journalistic story in the appearance of two bodies on the beach, the invention
of the character of Fernando (Carlos Larrañaga) is one of the main additions to the lm story. From the beginning of the plot,
it fullls a bipolar function between submission to Ignacia (in exchange for a more promising future) and seduction of Beatriz,
the chaste and pure bride who creates her trousseau with innite patience. We have already seen that in the journalistic
accounts there was always talk of the assumption that one of the sisters was a man disguised as a woman. is circumstance
is used in the ctional plot to exploit this narrative discovery, with Fernando becoming the key piece (due to his physical
conditions similar to Ignacia) to “get rid” of the body of the authoritarian sister, facilitate the escape of the Vidal brothers and
“promise them” a trip abroad that never went beyond Mazarrón beach.
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If the journalistic chronicles placed the Pérez Gómez brothers in that oppressive, claustrophobic and extravagant family
nucleus that we have described, Fernán-Gómez decides to take his lm with extraordinary force to “a grotesque model” of
representation to portray the Vidal brothers. Aware of the generic mix oered by the hypotext of the journalistic stories, (re)
worked in the script created by Beltrán, the lm addresses these perverse universes loaded with a black humor that is related
to its radically Spanish costumbrist dimension. e scriptwriter used popular language with rich dialogues and well-known
sayings (puritanical messages embroidered in cross stitch such as “leave lust for a month and it will leave you three”) to construct
a cinematographic story that turns out to be so arnichesque from a literary point of view, as well as lmically Nevillian, in
addition to incorporating “certain resources from Hollywood detective, suspense and horror lms” (Castro de Paz, 2010: 233).
ose presences evoke in us, as has already been studied on other occasions (Zunzunegui, 1993; Lorenzo, Izquierdo, 2009;
Zunzunegui, Aranzubía, 2023), the Hitchcock’s lmic bets in
Psycho
(1960), with the shadow of Ignacia walking through the
disturbing Castilian mansion (it reminds us a lot of Mrs. Bates), or her rst appearance emulating the housekeeper in
Rebecca
(1940) or, as some journalistic chronicles put it, the environment lived by the “real” siblings, the Pérez Gómez, emulating the
gloomy passages described by the Brontë sisters. In short, a rich intermedial network where, in addition to the transfer that
the adaptation of journalistic stories entails in the “based on real events”, a number of intermedial references are added, both
theatrical and plastic, typical of that grotesque or esperpento aesthetics (Rajewsky, 2005).
e lm was shot between March 30 and May 16, 1964 in the village of Santa Pola (Alicante) and in Loeches (Madrid), a place
chosen for its square, around which both the Vidal brothers’ house and the City Council are located. Along with the actors, an
important part of the population of the Madrilenian village had an active participation as extras, (the camera pans over the
faces of women and men of all ages, shocked/fascinated by the rhythms of the twist that have recently arrived in Spain in the
El Progreso
dance hall), which brings a certain documentary and “neorealist” air to its images, underlined by the contrasting
black and white photography of José F. Aguayo. From the nerve center of the village, the lm begins with a tour through the
covers of the newspapers and magazines on a kiosk, while the credits are overemphasized. In this visual review we nd the
front pages of the weekly
El Caso
26
, the magazine
Hola
, with a young and modest Rocío Dúrcal, newspapers such as
El Alcázar
and
Pueblo
, with the overwhelming presence of Franco reporting on his interview with Hussein, or
Gran Mundo
, with the
images of the wedding of Juan Carlos de Borbón and Sofía de Grecia on May 14, 1962. e journalistic oer captured by the
camera is completed with dierent fashion publications, the humor of
La Codorniz
, which also contrasts with the suggestive
photographs of myths as distant as Sophia Loren or Brigitte Bardot on the cover of
Life
magazine. In this unequivocal way the
cinematographic story is dated, distancing it from the real dates of the event, January 1956, which serves the screenwriter Pedro
Beltrán to portray a Spain that experiences a certain schizophrenia among the timid foreign stimuli, via incipient tourism or
economic developmentalism, and the sad reality of the country. is will allow for a more contrasted fresco with more nuances
than if it had been placed in Spain in the 1950s.
26
T
he headline of the weekly will refer to aseptic and foreign information: “e police of the world ght against tracking in white women”.
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e starting journalistic material, that family of bachelor siblings that has survived in an environment of voluntary marginality
in the village and the entire atmosphere that surrounds them, allows Fernán-Gómez a series of stylistic choices in his staging
and in his movements of camera that are highly sophisticated for the time. Not only because of the brilliant choice of the actors
or casting (Tota Alba, Rafaela Aparicio and Jesús Franco), who have antagonistic physiques (the bony and long Ignacia, who
seems taken from a painting by El Greco and the round, fat and screaming Paquita and Venancio) to embody those freaks, but
also for the creation of novel “elements” in the lm story, such as the solution of incorporating the body of the authoritarian
sister into the wine jar to give substance to the broth or the invention of scenes such as tango dancing with headphones
that represent the purest grotesque style. All that grotesque and Solanesque aesthetics in the staging of the lm, which
oscillates between the realism of the village scenes (in addition to the dancing, the gossiping wives who support and criticize
the haberdasher), with a shooting and camera movement close to the documentary genre, and the formal estrangement of
that “hidden or private face” of non-confessable relationships, drives us to those “perverse” practices that tell us about the
Berlanguian imagination recovered through Pedro Beltrán’s script and amplied by the gaze of the director.
Let us highlight that one of the most relevant camera movements takes place when the accidental murder is going to occur,
when Venancio and Paquita dare to enter the forbidden “temple” of Ignacia. e camera shows us what will be the murder
weapon, a bottle of brandy (another symbol of Spanishness), a box of chocolates (prohibited for the siblings), a dresser or
some drawers with sophisticated clothing inappropriate for a woman like Ignacia. e
tempo
in that journey, in that sequence
of the fateful night of the murder, refers to the most classic suspense cinema, but at the same time it incorporates at dierent
moments the native black humor of that group of elderly people, formed by secondary characters of great value and relevance
throughout the plot of
El extraño viaje
for his vitriolic comments.
is aesthetic and narrative approach would have its immediate consequences in the decision of the Classication Board,
which agreed in July 1964 to authorize the lm for people over 18 years of age, but with the classication of 2nd B
27
. Terrible
decision for the lm’s producer and distributor, which decided to keep the lm cans indenitely while the verdict was appealed.
Finally, on January 18, 1966,
El extraño viaje
was classied in 2nd A, but the lm would not be released until September 1969,
when it was screened at Madrid’s Odeón cinema as a complement to the lm
One Hundred Ries
(Tom Gries, 1969). Jesús
García Dueñas, lm critic for
Triunfo
magazine, was the only one who denounced the covert screening in a second-class
cinema and warned, as if it were a demerit for the lm, that
El extraño vi
aje is not the “chronicle of an event but an attempt
at a grotesque representation of some common traumas in our society”
28
. García Dueñas highlighted the indierence of the
lm industry towards this work and its author, a void that extended to the general press of greater or lesser circulation because
no critic paid attention to this lm. Miguel Marías’ reection in
Nuestro Cine
went further in this sense. ere, the author
describes the lm as “cursed” because of the delay in its release, because of the quality of the theater in which it took place and
27
General Administration Archive, box 36/0486, exp. 31812.
28
García Dueñas, J. “El extraño viaje del señor Fernán-Gómez: cuando ya no se tiene la vida por delante”,
Triunfo,
nº27, 27/9/1969.
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because Spanish cinema is a “monument to ruin and intellectual poverty”, criticizing the national newspapers for their lack of
interest in this work, thus consolidating “their ignorance”.
29
5. Conclusions
roughout this research we have corroborated our initial hypothesis, namely, that
El extraño viaje
is a paradigmatic case
of the invisibility of journalistic sources in Spanish “based on real events” cinema during Franco´s regime. at is, a type
of lm adaptations of historical criminal events, where the ctional story adapts factual stories of a journalistic nature. To
demonstrate this fact we have carried out a comparative study between the journalistic information of that well-known event
that occurred in January 1956 and its translation into cinematographic ction in Fernán-Gómez’s 1964 lm.
In this line of erasure of the original sources, in the preceding pages we have recorded the numerous restrictions that the lm
suered from the censorship board of the Franco´s administration, one of the most relevant for our study being the mandatory
elimination of any reference to the Mazarrón crime in the lm’s title, which was obviously also transferred to the lm’s credits.
e blunt decision of the Ministry of Information and Tourism, run in those years by Manuel Fraga, was intended to avoid
the (supposed) bad image that the lm could bring in an area of large private investments and with extraordinary tourist
possibilities.
We have analyzed in detail the news, reports and interviews that were published in four print media in order to detect what
traces are visible in this transfer, not always recognized, between the journalistic story and the cinematographic story. Even
though we are aware of the diculties that the study of such a slippery terrain as adaptations has always entailed, and even
more so in the case of the factual adaptations domain, our research conrms that both the essential core of the characters
that populated this event, as well as the description of their personalities and the claustrophobic, unsociable and distant
environment in which they lived in their village, are part of the journalistic story that was published in 1956. In the same way,
the assumption, also documented in that story, that the sister who disappeared in the Mazarrón beach was possibly a man
disguised as a woman, also serves the scriptwriter to develop a subplot of great lm creativity.
On the other hand, we have made it clear that the interpretations of some lm historians are not entirely correct when
considering that the solution devised by Berlanga is “without a doubt the most surprising and inspired” (Castro de Paz,
2010: 222) because, as we have noted, the journalistic chronicles already pointed to the gure of a man dressed in women’s
clothing. In this sense, other important elements in the lm narrative, such as the appearance of a corset, the corpses and the
three glasses on the beach, became fundamental assets for the construction of the lm, and all of them emanated from the
informative journalistic story and, ultimately, from the real event.
29
Marías, M. “El extraño caso de
El extraño viaje
”,
Nuestro Cine,
nº94, febrero 1970, pp. 54-56.
doxa.comunicación |
nº 39, pp. 335-352
July-December of 2024
Concepción Gómez García
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
| 351
As we recalled at the beginning of this work, recognizing that a cinematographic work was “based on real events” was not at all
common in Spanish cinema during much of the 20th century and, as we have shown, in the case study that concerns us it was
not even possible to maintain the initial title of the lm (
e crime of Mazarrón
) nor in the lm’s credits is there any reference
to the plot origin of the journalistic story or to the event in question. Fernán-Gómez himself, in his
Memoirs,
alluded to the fact
that
El extraño viaje
did not tell about Mazarrón’s crime, “but rather the solution that Berlanga’s imagination provided, and
all the details, the characters and the environment, the situations that the imagination of Beltrán added and that, of course,
are not extracted from police les, but rather taken out of his head. By moving away, ignoring what could be true, he achieved
a rather unusual mixture” (1993, 468). It is not our intention to refute one of the most interesting and personal lmmakers of
the Spanish cinema, but we can conclude that the “use” of this data collected by the press of the time is much more present
in the lm, of course processed, mixed and reinvented by the pen of the screenwriter Pedro Beltrán, author of a text full
of intelligence and creativity, and by the production of Fernando Fernán-Gómez, composing one of the most implacable
portraits of the Spanish society of that time.
6. Acknowledgements
is work has been written within the framework of the Research Project “Transmedialization and hybridization of
ction and non-ction in contemporary media culture (FICTRANS)”, Ref. PID2021-124434NB-I00, funded by MCIN/
AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER A way of making Europe, State Plan for Scientic, Technical and Innovation Research
2021-2023.
Article translated into English by the author and proofreading by Elena Pérez Clemente.
7. Conict of interest
e author declares that there is no conict of interest contained in this article.
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