This film has been mercilessly and unfairly ignored because of their ideological content and its historical and cinematographic values have been scandalously overlooked or dismissed. I think that its quality is excellent (take, for example, the scene of the murder of the priests on the beach, with that overwhelming view of the corpses softly caressed by the sea waves) and that (like in most of the films about the Civil War shot in Spain during the post-war years) what you see in it is enormously mild in comparison with all that really happened during that nefarious political period we know as the Second Spanish Republic. Sáenz De Heredia (one of the greatest and most shamefully under-under-under-underrated film directors in cinema history) proved once more that he was perfectly capable of telling a story as it must be told, and besides he surrounded himself with some of the best actors of the time, such as the wonderful Alfredo Mayo (the scene of his failed "shooting" is simply memorable), the beautiful and splendid Blanca De Silos, the equally good José Nieto, Raúl Cancio and the rest, but, most of all, I´d like to dedicate a special mention to that fabulous, gorgeous, intelligent, multi-faceted and talented woman that was the late Ana Mariscal (actress, writer, director and probably the sexiest spot-by-the-mouth artiste that there has ever been apart from Anne Francis), whose real-life brother, Luis Arroyo, plays the role of Jaime Churruca, the young murdered priest. Both the original book (written by Generalissimo Franco with the pseudonymous Jaime De Andrade) and the movie are small but truthful and REAL pieces of history and their quality is first-rate. Don´t let yourself influence by political or ideological prejudices: just see it and learn the truth, and keep on learning it afterwards. I beg you!
Review of Raza
