Movies

My father wrote the book Mi Tio Jacinto/My Uncle Jacinto and then also the script for the movie together with Ladislao Vajda. The movie became a blockbuster and is still popular, often shown as a contender for "Spain's best movie ever". It stars Pablito Calvo and Antonio Sica and is a movie for children of all ages, depicting a special day in the lives of down-and-nearly-out ex-bullfighter Jacinto and Pepote, his streetwise nephew. Honour is one antagonist, crime is another, booze a third, and separation the fourth (and the common denominator). For a long time, things look pretty bleak: Jacinto is down and out, he is broke, he has been ridiculed in front of what we feel is the half of Madrid, and he has lost his main reason to live, his honor, all in front of the boy who is the only important person in his life, and who is about to be taken from him. Don’t be silly, of course, it has a happy ending, sort of, maybe, if you choose to read it that way. Info IMDB. Buy the movie.  VIDEO  

Andres Laszlo Sr. wrote Paco el Seguro/Paco Never Fails, and co-wrote the script with Dedier Haudepin who also directed. The book/script was turned into a good movie but because of contractual complications it never got shown outside Spain. 

Paco Never Fails is set in Madrid – a place Andres Laszlo Sr. knows and paints well – in the early 1940s (i.e., during World War II and just after the end of the Spanish Civil War). Here we meet Paco Garcia who makes his living by mating with young girls from the countryside: girls who have come to Madrid after unwanted pregnancies to make a better life for themselves as wet-nurses and eventually need a new pregnancy to restart the milk flow. This was at the time a real profession and the “impregnator” most likely to succeed (i.e. "never" failed) became the one highest in demand. Paco sees himself as a serious and professional man and is determined to justify the income he is earning from his trade in this 100% decent period drama on a subject matter that would have allowed for a wide variety of alternative approaches. However, "never fails" isn't totally true because Paco has failed once – he has failed to grant his own wife her greatest wish, which is to become a mother – so when she unexpectedly becomes pregnant, Paco’s world descends into chaos. Wikipedia. Info IMDb.  VIDEO      VIDEO ON NEW MOVIE

I do not know whether Senior wrote this from scratch or from some text that now has been lost but he is accredited as script-writer (minus the dialogue that Eugenio Montes wrote). My guess is that there was some form of underlying work written by my father because he was a devoted pacifist that had spent time in jail for refusing to wear a uniform. His best friend, Ladislao Vajda, directed, and Warner Brothers produced. I have never seen the film. Info IMDb 

Marcel Marceau interpreted and performed Senior's Don Juan, Doña Juana, Juanita, and Juan, which I have renamed Doña Juana. The performance received good reviews and Marcel Marceau enjoyed the script (or choreography). I do not know the extent of Senior's involvement in the production of this play. View

Doña Juana must once have been a theater script, but the original score has been lost. What instead got published in Spanish was "a script dressed up as a novella" (Senior's Spanish publishers didn't publish theatre scripts). Senior worked as a stage manager and as a theater director in his youth, but I do not know whether Doña Juana was ever staged, but if so, it must have been back in the 1930s. However, as a mime, it has influenced the script that Marcel Marceau in the 1960s as Don Juan/Dom Juan. This text has now been turned back into a theater script and is in the process of receiving the attention it deserves.