Cinema
Radio Stories
Historias de la radio
José Luis Sáenz de Heredia · 1955
Synopsis
Madrid, in the mid-fifties. Radio keeps the country going with its contests, and three stories follow one another around its listeners. A sponsor promises 3,000 pesetas to the first person to show up at the studio dressed as an Eskimo with a dog, and an old inventor, who needs the money to have his invention patented, joins the race. A burglar picks up the telephone in the house he is emptying. A village schoolteacher answers the questions of a contest to pay for the operation of one of his pupils.
Context
An anthology film, it links its three stories through the love affair of a radio announcer and his fiancée, and brings real figures of the period into the fiction: the copla singer Gracia Montes, the bullfighter Rafael Gómez, known as el Gallo, the footballer Luis Molowny. José Isbert plays the inventor. It was shot in Madrid and in villages of the province of Ávila, to a score by Ernesto Halffter. Ten years later, the director made a sequel about television, less successful.
Who it is for
A black-and-white sketch comedy; it is better to know the place that radio and its contests held in Spain in 1955.
Prizes and reception
Distinguished by the Cercle des écrivains cinématographiques; often shown in television programmes devoted to the heritage of Spanish cinema.