The Big Family

Carlos and Mercedes raise fifteen children in a Madrid flat, with the grandfather squeezed in as well. The film follows a year of that crowd: exams, the summer holiday, money running short, first loves and the turn of the year. Its most remembered sequence has the youngest child disappear into the Christmas crowds of the Plaza Mayor. Nothing very large happens; the interest is in how seventeen people get around one table. It became a fixture of Spanish Christmas television for generations and produced two sequels. Critics have long noted that it sat comfortably alongside the state's push for large families in those years, which does not cancel out the film's warmth. José Isbert, the grandfather here, was playing the old executioner for Berlanga around the same time.