Tactics and Thresholds in Edgar Neville’s Life on a Thread (1945)

Abstract

The première of Edgar Neville’s The Front of Madrid (Carmen fra i rossi) on 23 March 1940 at the Palacio de Musica cinema on Madrid’s Gran Vía provoked a scandal. Neville, probably the most talented nationalist filmmaker of his generation, had directed the film the previous year at Mussolini’s Cinecittà studios in Rome as part of his contribution to the war effort. The outrage was caused by the movie’s final scenes in which a Nationalist officer and a member of a communist milicia die in an embrace as they are gunned down on the battle front. According to Emilio Sanz de Soto, the film was re-edited, certain dialogue was removed and eventually the negative disappeared altogether and is believed to have been destroyed. The same writer goes on to offer the following analysis:

Such was the naivete of Edgar Neville that he believed the moment for national reconciliation had arrived as soon as our horrific and incivil war had ended. Neither Edgar, nor anyone at the time, could have imagined that some of us would have to endure Franco’s victory throughout the following four decades. (1999: 58)

Neville, in Sanz de Soto’s words, was ‘neither a communist nor a fascist but something altogether different’ (1999: 56). In spite of its slight cuteness, the description captures the ambivalence, symbolized by Neville, of many supporters of the 18 July 1936 military uprising and locates him on the cusp of an ideological and cultural contradiction. Several critics, as we shall see, also identify a similar desire to represent national reconciliation in the film discussed in this chapter, Life on a Thread (La vida en un hilo, 1945) (Figure 5). Both films encroach upon the shaded zones of the undecidable, the subjunctive, the ‘what might have been’.