The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz

As a child Archibaldo comes to believe his mother's music box has the power to kill; his governess is shot while it is playing and the belief takes hold. As an adult he finds the box again and starts planning to murder women. Each time, the woman he has chosen dies before he can act: suicide, accident, someone else's hand. In the end he goes to a judge and confesses, and learns he has committed no crime at all. Luis Bunuel directed, from Rodolfo Usigli's 1944 novel. Ernesto Alonso plays Archibaldo, with Miroslava, Rita Macedo and Ariadna Welter in the cast. It is Welter's first film and Miroslava's last; she died shortly after filming. Its most cited scene is the mannequin: Archibaldo burns a wax copy of the woman he means to kill in a kiln. That Miroslava was cremated after her death gave the scene another weight, and Bunuel touches on the coincidence in his memoirs. Slant Magazine called it a twisted tragicomedy on male obsession, and critics have often compared its treatment of fixation to Hitchcock's Vertigo. Who it is for: viewers who like black comedy, Bunuel's surrealism and the idea of a killer who cannot manage a crime. Who it is not for: anyone uneasy with a run of dead women presented as comedy. The film holds that tone from beginning to end.