Of the many AFI awards "La Spagnola" was nominated for (don't blame the institute; it can't be easy coming up with candidates - although Alice Ansara, who played Lucia, DID deserve her nomination for best actress; she even deserved to win, which she didn't), the most puzzling was for original screenplay. This is an ORIGINAL screenplay? There isn't a novel or comic book lurking in the background to excuse the arbitrary plot developments, or to explain the fact that someone took an interest in this material in the first place...? Oh dear.
This is a miserable, squalid movie about miserable squalid characters - even the minor characters, even those who only get one scene, even those who only get one scene and don't even TALK - and the story is one damned miserable squalid thing after another. The way it ends is revealing. (Don't worry: I won't give anything away.) We just sort of fade out, as we watch what looks like the BEGINNINGS of a resolution ... all very honest not to suggest that the tensions can be resolved in a single, melodramatic confrontation, to suggest that the process might well take years, but the thing is, this only looks like even the beginning of the end BECAUSE we fade out. We could have faded out at any other point and the result would have been the same. Unrelated things happen in sequence, like the ticks of a metronome, with about as much purpose or genuine sense of rhythm. And we sense, despite what the fade out seems to be trying to imply, that the metronome will continue to tick on at the same rate until everyone ultimately dies. (It won't be before time when they do.)
Tiny scenes have been added for no reason other than to make the film all the more vile and mean-spirited. Lucia (the daughter) is an English/Italian/Spanish interpreter for the local doctor. There's no doubt she's exploited dreadfully. At first the doctor sees no reason to pay her at all; after a while, he offers a token payment of "a few shillings" a week. (Adjusting for inflation this still isn't much.) The doctor comes across as not a bad man, but a bit clueless and insensitive - when he learns that a patient speaks what appears to be some Slavic tongue, he asks Lucia to try talking to him in Italian, but slowly.
(Spoiler in this paragraph - I suppose.) Then, one day, the doctor asks the fourteen-year old Lucia to stay behind for a bit, gets her to sit on his knee. Obviously he's coming on to her. He starts talking about how much she reminds him of his wife. "You mean the one who hung herself on the jacaranda?" asks Lucia. This scene lasts just seconds. It has no repercussions. Its sole purpose is to let us know that the doctor, who has no bearing on the main story in any event, is a lecherous old toad with a taste for barely pubescent girls, who drove his wife to suicide. Did it even occur to the writer or the director that the film might have actually been richer if they'd stopped laying on the misanthropic spite with a trowel, for just a moment? If the doctor's exploitation of Lucia had been the unquestioning prejudice of a basically good man? Evidently not.
The SECOND most puzzling nomination, by the way, was for the cinematography. The cinematography makes me suspicious. Imagine a fantasy movie that's set in a mediaevel European wood but was in fact shot, by an admittedly skilled cameraman, in a municipal park - there's nothing in particular to give the game away, but you can sense that most of the creative effort has gone towards hiding something. The shots in "La Spagnola" are all very nicely focused and lit and framed, but they don't inspire confidence.
