HERENCIA MACABRA (1940)
aka A Macabre Legacy
Article 4823 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-16-2015
Directed by Jose Bohr
Featuring Miguel Arenas, Consuelo Frank, Ramon Armengod
Country: Mexico
What it is: Melodrama

A brilliant plastic surgeon discovers his wife is having an affair with one of his assistants, and he plans a gruesome revenge.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to watch a foreign movie without English subtitles that told enough of its story visually that I could follow it. I’m afraid I had no such luck today. In fact, I’m not sure I could really elaborate much more on the description above, which is all of the plot I knew about going into the movie. There are a few visual moments that work quite well; the events that reveal the affair to the doctor are done visually. However, most of the movie is talk, and the fact that the presentation is fairly static makes it a chore to sit through. My sources talk about there being “gruesome” scenes. These occur near the very end of the movie, and they are very mild indeed. I suspect if I could understand the Spanish dialogue, I might appreciate it a little better, but I suspect even then this would prove no classic. Still, I do have to somewhat reserve judgment on the movie.