Race, the Spirit of Franco

A fascinating demolition operation on Franco's imaginatively autobiographical exercise in cinematic myth-making, the 1941 Race, this juxtaposes sections of that notorious piece of melo- dramatic propaganda with the more prosaic testimonies of Franco's surviving sister, Pilar, and the actor Alfredo Mayo, who incarnated the role of the Franco surrogate 36 years earlier. The distance between fact and the romantic image is naturally comic, and the inherent interest of the previously inaccessible film is immense. The whole goes entertainingly beyond mere posthumous point-scoring.