The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz
(Luis Bunuel) 1955 Second Run Blu Ray
The film’s Spanish title Ensayo de un crimen translates as Rehearsal for a Crime and could be viewed as a “rehearsal for a life” which in the case of the life of Archibaldo de la Cruz’s hasn’t achieved very much. The rich, upper class, Archibaldo is a mentally disturbed and frustrated would-be serial killer. His failure to commit murder is the crux of his obsession: a perverse nostalgia to relive the eroticism of the moment when in 1910 as a young boy his nurse was killed by a stray revolutionary bullet.
Archibaldo had wound up a music box and she told him the story behind the box. Its melody (Jorge Perez’s music is as evocative as the tango music of Un Chien Andalou) some magical thinking and the sight of blood on the nurse’s neck, combined with an image of her revealed legs, was an erotic Freudian kick in the child’s psyche to convince Archibaldo that he alone had killed her. Here then was the desired incident that he must relive in adulthood and therefore commit murder. Not for hating women but for his loving memory of an ecstatic moment.
As an adult and patient in hospital, Archibaldo tells a nun about his juvenile ‘crime’. He then attacks her with an open razor. She escapes from his room only to enter an empty lift shaft and fall to her death. Archibaldo’s fixated on the purity of women and this causing of the nun’s death, without ever touching her, leaves him unsatisfied. Archibaldo meets other women he intends to kill but they die by the hands of another man, from an accident and by suicide. He confesses his ‘crimes’ to the police who regarded him as a fantasist.
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz is a black comic affair that’s full of the sly and surreal Bunuelian humour we’ve come to expect from this master of cinema. It’s quite wonderful how he can depict the erotic and surreal in the most unlikely places. Take for instance the burning of the female mannequin, resembling one of Archibaldo’s admirers, that’s angrily burnt in incinerator / kiln, once he realises that the woman he desires is promised to another man. The melting of the dummy’s wax face usually delivers a horror movie charge (Think House of Wax and grand guignol). Here it takes on a transient sexuality. Archibaldo has lost his thanatos-desired woman. Time is running out as quickly as those melting watches in a Dali landscape.
Bunuel’s anti-clericalism is spectacularly realised in the nun’s fall down the lift shaft. I’ve always read this as not just an accident but a mad ‘leap of faith’. Yet rather than promising survival after death, with an ascent to heaven, the holy woman is plummeted down to the concrete basement reality of a man-made hell. I first watched The Criminal Life of Archibaldo on TV when I was about 16. The shock of that lift fall has haunted me to this day and oddly reinforced my own atheism.
Irony permeates this satire on the wealthy and their shallow pursuit of what to do with themselves – killing to satisfy infantile trauma or throwing away your money gambling at the casino.
The film’s dark tone refers both back to the Mexican films with Bunuel’s El (1953), then forward to the mad impotency of the house guests trapped in The Exterminating Angel (1962): whilst the damaged mannequin’s leg also prefigures that real lost limb of Catherine Deneuve in the French Tristana (1970).
What of Bunuel’s own imposed happy ending? I won’t annoy you with a detailed plot spoiler but only say that Archibaldo’s cure is deliberately facile and begs the question what will he do next. There may or not be a real victim he can chalk up as his own and if not will a happy bourgeois marriage not turn out to be a cosy death of the soul that can’t compensate for his early music box epiphany?
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz is a humorous and highly entertaining film. It both subverts the suspense thriller and psychological drama to create a very Bunuelian world of a rich foolish man (Ernesto Alonso is brilliant in the title role) trapped by his subconscious needs and fetishistic preferences. Bunuel’s lighter (on the surface only) film returns in a new 4k restoration that shows off its bristling sadistic energy. And Second Run’s booklet notes and extras are first class.
Alan Price©2026.
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz
(Luis Bunuel) 1955 Second Run Blu Ray
The film’s Spanish title Ensayo de un crimen translates as Rehearsal for a Crime and could be viewed as a “rehearsal for a life” which in the case of the life of Archibaldo de la Cruz’s hasn’t achieved very much. The rich, upper class, Archibaldo is a mentally disturbed and frustrated would-be serial killer. His failure to commit murder is the crux of his obsession: a perverse nostalgia to relive the eroticism of the moment when in 1910 as a young boy his nurse was killed by a stray revolutionary bullet.
Archibaldo had wound up a music box and she told him the story behind the box. Its melody (Jorge Perez’s music is as evocative as the tango music of Un Chien Andalou) some magical thinking and the sight of blood on the nurse’s neck, combined with an image of her revealed legs, was an erotic Freudian kick in the child’s psyche to convince Archibaldo that he alone had killed her. Here then was the desired incident that he must relive in adulthood and therefore commit murder. Not for hating women but for his loving memory of an ecstatic moment.
As an adult and patient in hospital, Archibaldo tells a nun about his juvenile ‘crime’. He then attacks her with an open razor. She escapes from his room only to enter an empty lift shaft and fall to her death. Archibaldo’s fixated on the purity of women and this causing of the nun’s death, without ever touching her, leaves him unsatisfied. Archibaldo meets other women he intends to kill but they die by the hands of another man, from an accident and by suicide. He confesses his ‘crimes’ to the police who regarded him as a fantasist.
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz is a black comic affair that’s full of the sly and surreal Bunuelian humour we’ve come to expect from this master of cinema. It’s quite wonderful how he can depict the erotic and surreal in the most unlikely places. Take for instance the burning of the female mannequin, resembling one of Archibaldo’s admirers, that’s angrily burnt in incinerator / kiln, once he realises that the woman he desires is promised to another man. The melting of the dummy’s wax face usually delivers a horror movie charge (Think House of Wax and grand guignol). Here it takes on a transient sexuality. Archibaldo has lost his thanatos-desired woman. Time is running out as quickly as those melting watches in a Dali landscape.
Bunuel’s anti-clericalism is spectacularly realised in the nun’s fall down the lift shaft. I’ve always read this as not just an accident but a mad ‘leap of faith’. Yet rather than promising survival after death, with an ascent to heaven, the holy woman is plummeted down to the concrete basement reality of a man-made hell. I first watched The Criminal Life of Archibaldo on TV when I was about 16. The shock of that lift fall has haunted me to this day and oddly reinforced my own atheism.
Irony permeates this satire on the wealthy and their shallow pursuit of what to do with themselves – killing to satisfy infantile trauma or throwing away your money gambling at the casino.
The film’s dark tone refers both back to the Mexican films with Bunuel’s El (1953), then forward to the mad impotency of the house guests trapped in The Exterminating Angel (1962): whilst the damaged mannequin’s leg also prefigures that real lost limb of Catherine Deneuve in the French Tristana (1970).
What of Bunuel’s own imposed happy ending? I won’t annoy you with a detailed plot spoiler but only say that Archibaldo’s cure is deliberately facile and begs the question what will he do next. There may or not be a real victim he can chalk up as his own and if not will a happy bourgeois marriage not turn out to be a cosy death of the soul that can’t compensate for his early music box epiphany?
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz is a humorous and highly entertaining film. It both subverts the suspense thriller and psychological drama to create a very Bunuelian world of a rich foolish man (Ernesto Alonso is brilliant in the title role) trapped by his subconscious needs and fetishistic preferences. Bunuel’s lighter (on the surface only) film returns in a new 4k restoration that shows off its bristling sadistic energy. And Second Run’s booklet notes and extras are first class.
Alan Price©2026.
By Alan Price • film, year 2026 • Tags: Alan Price, film