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Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

That of course is where Jesus supposedly said "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." That is to say, thinking about doing a thing is as bad as doing it. That precept never made much sense to yours truly, and apparently it didn't to Luis Bunuel either, because the whole point of this movie seems to be to refute that notion. The title character fantasizes about killing various women he comes across, but circumstances always seem to conspire to prevent it. At the end when he demands to be arrested, an authority figure replies, in effect, "For what? You didn't do anything." The best part of the film is the opening sequence apparently taking place around the end of the Mexican revolution period c. 1920, with Archibaldo as an insufferably spoiled only child giving grief to his long-suffering but stoic nanny. Filmed in Bunuel's trademark style with long takes and barely perceptible camera movements, this battle of wills is fascinating until the arrival of the lad's rich idiot mother (rich idiots being one of Bunuel's favorite lifelong targets). Meanwhile the nanny watches through the window as a gun battle unfolds in the street below; she catches a stray bullet, and young Archibaldo finds himself fascinated with her corpse. Cut forward to the adult Archibaldo, now a rich idiot in his own right plus an obsession with being a serial killer. This main part of the film was less interesting for me, mostly because Bunuel allows the adult actor to perform almost like a cartoon, with bulging eyes and goofy leer, like a mentally retarded Snidely Whiplash. The supporting cast are competent performers but in my memory I have trouble telling some of them apart. There are some nice fantasy sequences, such as Archibaldo ordering his bride to undergo an elaborate Catholic ritual before shooting her. Probably the best known sequence, Archibaldo cremating a mannequin, left me more or less unmoved, although it probably seemed more sensational in 1955. Part of the problem here is that, as in the later "American Psycho," how compelling is it if all the bad stuff takes place inside the guy's head? Also there's a lack of that great sexual tension that Bunuel was able to generate in some of his other Mexican work, such as "Susana" or "El Bruto." But certainly it's a must see at least for Bunuel fans; like Hitchcock's "The Trouble with Harry" from the same year, this is the closest this director comes to true whimsy (especially the parts with the American tourists) in a career of mostly much darker shades.

"Ensayo de un Crimen" describes a man that after a childhood experience intimately connected with a music box revels in murder dreams - sex, pleasure and murder being intimately linked: In the time of the Mexican revolution his baby-sitter was killed by a stray bullet in front of him. As she is lying there dead and defenseless, blood running down her throat, going down her thighs, the boy feels deep pleasure and power. All this is punctuated by the sound of a musical box. In the chaos of the times the musical box disappears and these feelings are buried and forgotten. One day, Archibaldo de la Cruz, already a grown man, finds that musical box in a shop and, barely concealing his excitement, buys it and his old dreams come to the surface again.In the beginning of the film (after a mysterious accident suffered by a nun), he goes to the police station in order to confess a murder and tells the story of his life to the police chief. His life is shown in flashbacks and shows the life he led and the women he met. From now on it is difficult to tell reality from dreams.Buñuel is a very good actor's director and aptly describes the straight-jacket morality of the time where official marriage is mandatory (for women this is like a prison where the warder is her husband), and the icons of the catholic church are a dominant presence. Here are the essential elements present in the films of Buñuel. Fantasy/ Reality, double-standard morality and the church - the only road to freedom seems surrealism, fantasy overtaking reality.Buñuel's films are sensuous and full of atmosphere and here as usual reality is not what it seems. Even if he, in his early Mexican films, seems to make concessions to the producers, you will notice under the surface all the themes that obsessed Buñuel and that would come to the foreground in films like "Viridiana", "El Angel Exterminador", "Belle de Jour" etc..

In the 50's, in Mexico, Archibaldo de la Cruz (Ernesto Alonso) comes to a judge to confess crimes of his own. He tells his life since he was a spoiled boy, in the days of the Mexican revolution, when he won a music box from his mother and developed a bizarre desire of killing women, becoming a serial killer. In the end, this movie is a psychological dark comedy of the Mexican phase of Buñuel. I have just had the chance to see this film on DVD, recently released by the best Brazilian distributor (Versátil), and I found it another excellent work of Buñuel, one of my favorite directors ever. The story is very ironic and unpredictable, and I totally disagree with the User Comments `Minor Buñuel' indicated for this film. My vote is nine.Title (Brazil): `Ensaio de um Crime' (`Rehearsal for a Crime')

Following your advice, I recently `relented' to buying from Alapage the two Luis Bunuel Double-Feature discs released in France by Film Sans Frontieres. After watching them in their entirety, I cannot believe that I, who consider Bunuel my all-time favorite director and one of the true masters of the medium, have waited this long to acquire these DVDs. Actually while Alapage listed these DVDs at EUR25.73 on their site, they only cost me EUR21.51 each (excluding EUR12 shipping charges). So, if there is still anybody who has not purchased them yet, now may be the time to do so! Since I had never watched EL (1952) before, it was the first one to go through my DVD player. It was a chilling parable of an insanely jealous middle-aged man played with acute intensity by Arturo De Cordova. It afforded Bunuel ample opportunity to make practical use of overt Freudian symbolism without lending the film a heavy-handed air of pretentiousness. While there are some critics who consider it as merely `an engaging, minor work', I regard it as being among Bunuel's finest; arguably, with this film, Bunuel reached the culmination of his work in Mexico, but it also looks forward to similar sequences and themes he would tackle later on in his career, especially TRISTANA (1970) and, his last film, THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (1977). EL was beautifully abetted by another of his low-budget Mexican films, the great black comedy THE CRIMINAL LIFE OF ARCHIBALDO DE LA CRUZ (1955). Again, critical reception was a bit muted in some circles, dismissing it as `just a throwaway oddity' typical of Bunuel's films of the period. However, it is much more than that: it is certainly very funny if you can accept its macabre sense of humor. It allowed Bunuel to create some of the most memorable images in all of his films, especially the celebrated dummy incineration scene, which could have been "inspired" by a similar scene in Michael Curtiz's marvelous MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1933) which Bunuel must have seen while working at Warner Bros. in the Thirties. A similar instance of this eclectic approach on Bunuel's part can be found in the "walking hand" sequence in his THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962) - one of my favorite Bunuels - which harks back to an identical premise in Robert Florey's THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS (1946), another Warner Bros. horror melodrama. For me, one of the enduring assets of THE CRIMINAL LIFE OF ARCHIBALDO DE LA CRUZ is the charm and great beauty that was Miroslava Stern (who played the part of Lavinia and was the model for the ill-fated dummy). Tragically, she would take her own life a mere two weeks after the film's release with her body, ironically enough, ending up cremated! Both the print utilized and the transfer for both films were adequate enough, and perfectly acceptable under the circumstances. However, EL's overall visual and aural qualities where distinctly superior to those of ARCHIBALDO which suffered from excessive specks and slight audio dropouts at times, but were never so alarming as to dispel from one's viewing pleasure of the film.