20 - A Modern Day Fénix: Lope de Vega's Cinematic Revivals

Summary

Ever since Ramón Menéndez Pidal referred to a Lope play as a ‘verdadero cinedrama’ [genuinely cinematic drama],commentators have persistently noted the cinematic quality of the comedia, with its rapid scene changes and prioritising of action over characterisation. Nonetheless, there is no real tradition, beyond the occasional one-off project, of filming Golden Age plays for the silver screen. Even if we resist the arguably unfair comparison with Shakespeare, the comedia lags behind other native Spanish literary works. As Peter W. Evans notes:

There have been comparatively few adaptations of Golden-Age plays. Even in the 20s and in the 60s and in the early 70s when, for different historical reasons, the Spanish cinema was repeatedly turning to the country's literary heritage, filmmakers were rarely inspired by the comedia.

In the case of Lope de Vega, there have, to date, been the following cinematic adaptations: Fuenteovejuna (1947), La moza de cántaro (1953), Fuenteovejuna (1972), La leyenda del alcalde de Zalamea [The Legend of the Mayor of Zalamea] (1973), El mejor alcalde, el rey (1973), El perro del hortelano (1996) and, most recently, La dama boba (2006). With a total of seven screen appearances, there have been more films based on Lope's plays in Spain than of any other native seventeenth-century dramatist; nevertheless this popularity is only relative, and is placed in sharp relief when one considers that there have been ten adaptations of both Don Quijote and Don Juan Tenorio. In this article, I will offer a brief history of the production and reception of these seven films, paying particular attention to Antonio Román's Fuenteovejuna, Pilar Miró's El perro del hortelano and Manuel Iborra's La dama boba.

Lope made his screen debut in 1935 with La musa y el Fénix [The Muse and the Phoenix], written by Eduardo G. Portillo and directed by the German filmmaker Constantin David. The film was a fictional recreation of the playwright's life and times rather than an adaptation of one of his works. It was another non-Spanish director, Jean Renoir, who then planned to make the first screen adaptation of a Lope play with Fuenteovejuna in the late 1930s, but the project ground to a halt when the Republicans began to lose the Civil War.