The title of this Spanish-language film translates as "You will not kill", but I assume that the more portentous (and Biblical) commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' is closer to the director/author's intention. The most intriguing thing about this very low-budget Mexican movie is that some sequences were actually filmed in New York City: street shots of what appear to be Spanish Harlem or Washington Heights. The director must have used a camera concealed in a vehicle, as pedestrians (who are plainly not professional actors) walk right past the action without any self-consciousness.
Semi-handsome Ramón Pereda plays a young immigrant from Spain who has come to New York City hoping to make good, but he just can't get an honest break. He gradually drifts into bootlegging, spending his time with Latino criminals far less cultured than himself. Eventually he is reformed by the love of a good woman, in the form of Adriana Lamar as an attractive cabaret singer ... and some help from his brother (Alberto O'Farrell, a name to conjure with).
This movie isn't very plausible. Released in 1937 (four years after Repeal) it firmly takes place within Prohibition, yet (unless I missed something in the Spanish dialogue) there's no attempt to stage the action as a period piece taking place a few years earlier. One possible explanation for this might be that the director/screenwriter Miguel Contreras Torres commenced production on this film before Repeal, and needed several years to complete it. A likelier explanation is that he just didn't bother to get his facts right.
This movie appears to have been made for Mexican audiences, so I'm intrigued that the protagonist is specifically identified in the dialogue as from Spain (not Mexico), and he's played by an actor using a Spanish (not Mexican) accent. This may have been some sort of snob appeal. Just as many American viewers are anglophilically attracted to movies full of upper-class English accents and stately British homes, there may well be Mexican filmgoers who would rather see movies about Spaniards than about Mexicans.
Sadly, the extremely low production budget of this movie impaired my ability to take it seriously. We see a very convincing shot of a New York street: shot on grainy film stock, but still convincing in a cinema-verite way. We see a man walk past the camera, his face conveniently concealed. He glances furtively round, then he enters a building. Cut to an interior, as the same character steps into a one-room flat. It's blindingly obvious that this 'same' person is actually a completely different man (wearing only vaguely similar clothing), and the room (apparently someplace in Mexico) doesn't plausibly resemble an interior of the Manhattan building we saw in the previous shot. Even in the interior sequences, there's very bad shot-matching. The dialogue is badly post-dubbed, too.
I'll rate this movie 2 points, purely for its ambitions ... not for its achievements.
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