Oro Vil: Western pionero Espanol

Authors: Víctor Matellano, Miguel Olid

 

Country: Spain

Publisher: Pigmalion

Language: Spanish

Pages: 160

ISBN 9788410389021

Available: Now

 

October 1941. The pioneering Spanish western Oro vil is filmed, under the orders of Eduardo García Maroto from Jaén, in the Madrid landscape of La Pedriza, in the municipality of Manzanares El Real. A police motorcyclist arrives at the filming in order to take the director immediately to Madrid. The team fears that the filmmaker has gotten involved in some political matter, since he had previously had run-ins with the censorship of the dictatorial regime. But no. It was about Maroto having to put himself, "by imperative", provisionally at the controls of the filming of Raza, the film exalting the national-Catholic ideology of the Franco regime...

Two years after the end of the Civil War, and when only the classic pre-stagecoach westerns had arrived in this country, since this film will be released a few years late, the great lover of the western, García Maroto, as brave as he is determined, dares to play a western, but also not as a parody, but in a dramatic key.

Vile gold was a precarious way of approaching the Far West: it cost one hundred and fifty thousand pesetas compared to the one million six hundred and fifty thousand of Raza, so here there were neither adequate revolvers nor horses specialized in action. And it was not exactly a success, but it was a pioneer in that wonderful anachronism of filming stories of the American Wild West in Spain.

There seems to be no copy of Oro vil today, although there is the script and some shooting photos, still photos and posters, which give an idea of what the film was like that narrates the arrival of a Spaniard to a land populated by Indians and where gold prospectors proliferate. Due to its precariousness, it did not have large rides, but it did have its skirmishes and fights.

Until that moment, the western that García Maroto had been able to see, and even so he had fallen in love with, was quite simple and primitive in plots and characters, these very simple, Manichean, in low-cost films, inspired by the "horse operas", the popular stories on horseback. And Vile Gold has a lot of that cinema, if possible, even more primitive in this case, which makes García Maroto's endeavor an even more heroic feat. The script and photographs included in this volume attest to this.

A pioneer in many things, in the western so is García Maroto, who will later participate in other American productions of the genre that are shot on Spanish soil, such as The Return of the Magnificent Seven in the provinces of Alicante and Madrid, or Villa cabalga, in Colmenar Viejo, among other locations.