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Calle Judería Vieja 12 40001 Segovia
Tf 921 466 706/Fax 921 466 708
info@muces.es
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96 -
EDUARDO GARCÍA MAROTO
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EDUARDO GARCÍA MAROTO,
a very literary filmmaker
García Maroto (Jaén, 1903 – Madrid, 1989) is perhaps one of the most unfairly treated directors in the history of Spanish cinema. He was possibly the most technically prepared filmmaker of his generation. Starting out in the film industry as an assistant in one of Madrid´s film laboratories, he very soon left this technical work to begin working first as assistant and then full camera operator. After participating in a long list of silent movies, he set off for Paris to acquire the necessary expertise to cope with the arrival of ´talkies´, making himself one of the first and best prepared in Spain for this important change.
This enabled him to be appointed Chief Editor at the C.E.A. Productions, one of the most powerful companies in Republican Spain, where he worked with Luis Buñuel. It was during this period that he took his first steps as a director, with a series of short films, entitled ´Una de….´, which gained unanimous praise from both critics and the public. These short parodies of different genres (adventure stories, terror and police thrillers) marked the beginning of a fruitful relationship with Miguel Mihura, who wrote the scripts for these successful shorts. It was also Mihura who had the idea for his first feature film, ´The criminal´s daughter´ (La hija del penal), produced by CIFESA, the leading production company of the time, and this was equally successful.
His next project was an adaptation of a work by Wenceslao Fernández Flores, but this never took shape, as the Civil War broke out just a few months before. After the war was over, Garcia Maroto was one of the first directors to shoot, again with CIFESA, in a war-torn country. This time it was a charming comedy, entitled ´The four Robinsons´, based on a work by Pedro Muñoz Seca.
After a patchy career, García Maroto´s close relationship with writers was re-established at the end of his time as director. His last feature film retrieved the good idea discovered in his early short films: the parody of film genres. On this occasion his literary accomplice was not Mihura, but rather Tono, with whom he produced a witty, fun film, called ´Three are Three´ (Tres eran Tres), which was well liked by the public, but badly received by the ruling bodies of Spain´s film industry in the fifties, and led, almost immediately, to economic failure and the end of his career as a director.
Almost a decade later, when he was working regularly as director of big North American productions shot in Spain (Solomon and Sheba, Spartacus, etc), he made a 30 minute short film in which he summarized the first part of the adventures of Don Quixote. This project was part of a more ambitious plan to make Cervantes´ work more accessible to children, but once again, the absolute lack of understanding on the part of the State and complete lack of support brought about the collapse of this spirited company and his unjust end as a film director.
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