Debut
Starring Antonio and Rosario, the great dance couple of the moment, curiously the film was neither a musical nor a dance film, although ballet is very present
José María Forqué (Zaragoza 1923 – Madrid 1995) is one of the great directors of Spanish cinema of the second half of the 20th century. A contemporary of Berlanga and Juan Antonio Bardém, his great film was ‘Atraco a las tres’, but his feature film debut came with ‘Niebla y sol’ (1951). Starring Antonio and Rosario, the great dance couple of the moment, curiously the film was neither a musical nor a dance film, although the ballet is very present.
José María Forqué studied architecture, a career he abandoned to work as a draftsman and pay for his job as a quantity surveyor. Interested in theatre, he collaborated with the Spanish university theatre, managing to shoot more than 15 short films, being a regular at the gatherings that took place in the Café Gijón in Madrid in the 1940s, in a group including Alfonso Sastre, Alfonso Paso, José Gordon, who earned money as a “black” from some Francoist politician, Carlos José Iglesias and, occasionally, Enrique Jardiel Poncela, the most famous of them all and the only one who maintained a continuous career as a playwright. Forqué considered himself self-taught and always said that he learned cinema by sneaking into filming and making short films.
In Gijón, thanks to Miguel Herrero, a man with potential, with whom he maintained friendship from Zaragoza, he meets a regional film distributor named Esteba, to whom he asks him to produce a feature film. Forqué was attracted to a work by Horacio Ruiz de la Fuente, and he proposed taking it to the cinema. Between the three of them, Esteba, Herrero (who puts up the money) and Forqué, decide that ‘Three Destinations’, three stories by Horacio Ruiz de la Fuente and Medardo Fraile, could be brought to the screen. Soon, due to its complexity, it is suggested that the film will be reduced to adapting one of them. ‘The cold hell’ was the chosen story, which for the screen would take the name of ‘Fog and sun’, Pedro Lazaga joining Forqué in writing the script. Thanks to Miguel Herrero, whom Forqué considered «a potential Onassis», the participation of Rosario and Antonio, the greatest artistic couple of the late 40s and early 50s, was achieved, and the script was derived towards them. Together with Antonio and Rosario, the film stars Carlos Muñoz, Asunción Sancho and María Dolores Pradera.
The plot followed Jaime, a musical composer who lived in seclusion in Galicia due to the illness of his wife Isabel. On a trip to Madrid, he meets Antonio, who asks him to write a Spanish ballet for Rosario and himself. He puts his greatest illusions as an artist into the effort, until his wife’s doctor tells him that Isabel’s days are numbered. Isabel, in her last moments, writes a letter to her husband, which she cannot finish, without being able to reveal the secret that gripped her heart. Given the unfinished letter, Jaime feels powerless to get to the bottom of the truth, and under the influence of the fateful days he is going through, he continues writing the ballet, now encouraged by Julia, his new muse. Despair and pain -the mist- will succeed (the sun) of another love that is offered. The ballet will premiere with enormous success under the title ‘The man and the star’.
“I thought of the phrases as a possible dialogue that told the story of the ballet, and that’s how it was shot,” Forqué would recall years later. The film was shot at the Orphea Studios in Barcelona in 1950. Miguel Herrero founded the production company Ariel to produce it, with Pedro Lazaga as assistant director and Antonio himself as choreographer.
It premiered at the Coliseum cinema in Madrid on December 13, 1951 with modest success, but the film was chosen to participate in the Venice Film Festival, and the author of the soundtrack, Jesús G. Leoz, was awarded the Film Writers Circle.
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