This week marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Francisco Franco, the Generalísimo who ruled Spain as a dictator for four decades. The moment has triggered a flood of commentary regarding his legacy and profound impact on 20th-century Spain, including effects that linger today.
Perhaps less known is that Franco was an ardent cinephile. In his youth, he shot his own home movies with a 9.5 millimeter Pathé-Baby camera. And as he rose to power he came to appreciate the propaganda value of film.
Shortly after the Spanish Civil War, which put him in power, Franco authored a novel titled Raza (Race). It presented his own version of the war, portraying the Nationalists as the true defenders of God, family, and Spanish tradition. He then worked closely with director José Luis Sáenz de Heredia to adapt it into a film. Franco remained intimately involved, providing daily instructions and generously funding what became a lavish production for the time.
In the 1950s, the dictatorship began welcoming foreign filmmakers to Spain. Cheap labor, abundant sunshine, and dramatic landscapes made it an attractive offer for Hollywood studios looking to cut costs while competing with the growing popularity of television. In 1955, director Stanley Kramer met with Franco himself to secure support for the making of Alexander the Great. Dozens of large-scale international productions would follow, including Lawrence of Arabia and Cleopatra. At the same time, the dictatorship imposed a strict censorship regime domestically. Many Hollywood films shown in Spain suffered cuts from the censors.
Franco had his own cinema in his residence at the Palacio El Pardo. Twice a week he would screen a feature film, preceded by a newsreel, for himself and a few family members. Between 1946 and 1975, over 2,000 films were shown at El Pardo.
In their book Las películas que vio Franco (The Films that Franco Saw), historians José María Caparrós and Magí Crusells analyze records of these screenings—the equivalent of viewing Franco’s Netflix history. It is an eclectic list of films, but they note that Franco had a special interest in Hollywood productions, with a particular passion for Westerns and war films.
Caparrós and Crusells highlight the fact that Franco often saw films in their original form, before they passed through the censors, as well as films that had been banned from Spanish screens altogether.
On July 4, 1961, Franco and friends watched Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana. Though produced in Spain, the film was banned from Spanish theaters after the Catholic Church in Rome complained. Spanish authorities went so far as to retroactively revoke the film’s production license, essentially denying that the film had ever been a Spanish production. The ban was not lifted until 1977, two years after Franco’s death.
He also watched the comedy It Started with a Kiss, which follows the antics of an American air force sergeant and his wife while stationed at an American base in Spain. The film angered Spanish censors for its portrayal of Spanish society and the many references to Spanish poverty, through jokes about old cars, unreliable buses, and substandard hotels. While the producers were given permission to shoot in Spain, the film never made it to Spanish theaters. (I wrote about the story behind this film previously.)
Spanish productions are poorly represented in the viewing records from El Pardo. Indeed, the dictatorship was particularly oppressive for the Spanish film industry. While notable directors like Juan Bardem, Luis García Berlanga, and Carlos Saura managed to create innovative films under the regime, they constantly battled bureaucratic hurdles, lack of funding, and the ever-present censors. But Franco’s death 1975 and the transition to democracy cleared the way for a new generation of filmmakers, such as Pedro Almodóvar, to emerge and define modern Spanish cinema.
* The photograph above shows the beach at Algarrobico, where the attack on Aqaba from Lawrence of Arabia was filmed in the early 1960s.