The Brave One

[Sue Sue Applegate]

This delightful film has brought back such a flood of memories of for me. Right now, they are touring Mexico City, and it is sweet how all of the grand monuments engender such reverence and delight for an impressionable young boy.

Jack Cardiff did much justice to the deep cirulean blues of the sky, and the interiors of the bullrings and the national shrines. There is some wonderful Hemingwayesque moments in the bullfighting sequences, and since I attended bullfights early on in my visits to Mexico, I understand the ceremony and grandeur of the moment, a symbolic sport and art symbolizing the first moments when a dismounted, unarmed man meets a wild beast. But that perception hearkens back to a different time and place where PETA aficionados did not tread. I have seen bullfights all over Mexico and at the main bullring in Madrid, and the excitement and adoration of the matadors is still part of the mythology of the spectacle. But my personal sympathies remain with the desires of the young boy, Leonardo, who runs to the Palacio Nacional to ask the president of Mexico to save his "blessed" bull, Gitano.

Certain filmed sequences remind me of scenes from Tossa Del Mar in Pandora and The Flying Dutchman, and the purplish blue hues in the sky tell me....Jack Cardiff. Lovely photography.

Dalton Trumbo, wrote the script for this sweet film under one of his blacklist noms-de-plume, Robert Rich, and was finally awarded the Oscar 18 years later for his screenplay in 1975. Evidently, however, the screenplay was very much like a script for an animated feature entitled "Ring Around Saturn" and independent producer, Edward Nassour, who produced the television series "Sheena, Queen of the Jungle," sued the King Brothers over the similarities, and they paid him $750,000. "Ring of Saturn" was eventually produced as Emilio and His Magic Bull in 1975 with Ted Knight.

Gitano is reprieved by the dropping of a white handkerchief at the last moment, and Leonardo jumps into the ring to embrace him.