The Exquisite Cadaver
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| The Exquisite Cadaver | |
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| Directed by | Vicente Aranda |
| Produced by | Sidney Pink, Stanley Abrams Carlos Durán |
| Written by | Vicente Aranda, Antonio Rabinad, Gonzalo Suárez (based on his story "Bailando para Parker") |
| Starring | Carlos Estrada, Judy Matheson, Capucine, Teresa Gimpera |
| Music by | Marco Rossi |
| Cinematography | Juan Amorós |
| Editing by | Maricel Bautista, Bautista Treig |
| Distributed by | Morgana Films |
| Release date(s) |  August 25, 1969 January, 1973 |
| Running time | 108 min. |
| Country | Spain |
| Language | Spanish |
| IMDb profile | |
Las Crueles (English: The Exquisite Cadaver ) AKA: The Cruel Ones is a 1969 Spanish art house exploitation film directed by Vicente Aranda, based on the short story, Bailando Para Parker written by Gonzalo Suárez. A man begins to receive severed body parts in the mail two years after his mistress committed suicide. Along with one of these bloody parcels is a letter of blackmail from the dead woman's one time lesbian lover seeking vengeance. The film has reached cult status for his mix of horror with lesbian overtones.
[edit] Plot
With slow deliberation, a girl lays her head down on railroad tracks as an oncoming train plows forward. Two years later, Carlos, a well-do-do family man and publisher of pulp horror novels receives an anonymous yellow package containing a severed human hand. He buries it in a nearby park. The next yellow package he receives, he leaves unopened on a bench in the city. When he arrives home, the package is awaiting him. This one contains a torn up dress and a photograph of a girl. His beautiful wife reads him a telegram asking if he would like a forearm. He feebly attempts to lie about the contents with a work-related explanation to his wife. Now suspicious, Carlos’s wife follows her husband and spots a mysterious woman in black following him as well.
Without a word, Carlos enters the car of the mysterious woman. She drives him to her remote home, where she feeds him lysergic acid embedded in red blotting paper. Suddenly, he is ambling down a long corridor drawn towards a woman's voice lamenting her lost love. He reaches the end of the hallway to discover the voice emanating from a tape recorder. He finds a woman's body in a refrigerator curled up, pale, but immaculate. When he awakens from the drugged stupor he is back at home, his body covered in a jaundiced yellow.
In a flashback, the young woman of the refrigerator is in a coffee shop fiddling with some pills. She appears bored, yet eager to flirt with the older publisher. Her name is Esther and she reveals her sign to be Cancer. In another fragment of the past, the newly formed couple of Carlos and Esther is out near the sea. As she edges toward the cliff, she says, "I'd die so that my love for you will last. So that indifference will not kill it".
Through the collective memories of the publisher, his wife, the detective that she hired to spy on her husband, and the mysterious woman, the corrosion of the romance is recounted. Esther heartbroken after, Carlos has left her gets sick with cancer. Parker meets Esther falls in love with her and recues her from a false healer. Slowly Esther dies. It is then when Parker plans to avenge her deceased lover. She managed to seduce the editor’s wife who leave her husband for her.
[edit] Cast
- André Argaud – Carlos
- Capucine - Parker (Lucia Fonte)
- Teresa Gimpera - editor's wife
- Judy Matheson – Esther
- José María Blanco - the writer*Alicia Tomás - the secretary
- Luis Ciges - functionary
- Joaquín Vilar - child
[edit] External links
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