Screening as part of our Luís Buñuel retrospective, Buñuel in Spain.

The great flamenco dancer Carmen Amaya stars in The Daughter of Juan Simón, an over-the-top, outrageous melodrama complete with an unwed mother and the noble peasant willing to sacrifice all to make her an honest woman. Buñuel is credited as the film’s producer and “supervisor,” yet one can see traces of his style in the way that he pushes genre clichés to the point that film practically becomes about the clichés. The film wound up being an enormous success, and was one of the first Spanish sound films to be distributed abroad.