1969 film
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.[1] The plot follows a well-do-do publisher and family man, who 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.
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.
Cast
The film has an international cast headed by: the French actress Capucine, the Argentinian Carlos EStrada, the British Judy Matheson and the Spanish model and actress, Teresa Gimpera. [2]
- Capucine - Parker (Lucia Fonte)
- Carlos Estrada - Editor
- Teresa Gimpera - Editor's wife
- Judy Matheson – Esther
- José María Blanco - the writer
- Alicia Tomás - the secretary
- Luis Ciges - functionary
- Joaquín Vilar - child
Overview
For his third film, Spanish film director Vicente Aranda took a commercial approach mixing fantastic and erotic overtones in The Exquisite Cadaver after his two previous films were met with indifference by critics and audiences. The filmed was plagued with a series of problems: it was long in the making; Aranda suffered an accident during the shooting, which forced him to work from a stretcher and finally he had a legal battle with the producers.[3] It would take Aranda many years to recover ownership of this film. The experience made him found his own production company: Morgana film, which would produce his next six films.[4]. The producers of the film did not like its original title: The Exquisite Cadaver (El Cadaver Exquisito) and imposed upon the direcots will the title The Cruel Ones (Las Crueles). Nevertheless upon relesased on VHS it better known as The Exquisite Cadaver
August 25 1969 
January, 1973
