Jose Luis Saenz de Heredia

José Luis Sáenz de Heredia y Oslo was born in the capital of Spain, on April 10, 1911. He comes from an aristocratic family, closely related to politics, since he was the first cousin of José Antonio Primo de Rivera y Sáenz de Heredia, the founder of the Falange and therefore nephew of General Miguel Primo de Rivera.

He made his debut as a feature film director by chance. According to the book “Art and politics in the cinema of the Republic”, by José María Caparrós Lera, some recently inaugurated sound studios, the Ballesteros-Tona, commissioned her to write the script for Patricio looked at a star , with which they planned to become an occasional producer. of movies. The owner of the company, Serafín Ballesteros , and director of photography, discussed with the director, Fernando Delgadoshortly after the start of filming. Ballesteros could not come up with a better idea than to call the scriptwriter. “I’m in a horrible mess. You have to lead,” he told her. “I resisted,” recalled Sáenz de Heredia. “I confessed to him that when I had seen the closest cinema it had been from row eight. But it was all useless, he insisted, and on the other hand it seemed like a good opportunity, so I accepted.”

Due to his inexperience, Sáenz de Heredia took no less than eight months to complete the tape. “I remember that I was on the street with Edgar Neville , who with his usual joke asked me: How is that King of kings doing ?”, explained the director, who received a whopping 210 pesetas, and also began to know the trade.

The film, about a haberdashery shop clerk who dreams of being an actor, portrays the world of cinema with a certain grace, and received very favorable reviews upon its release. But it was a resounding commercial failure, which only ran for a week. In this way, Ballesteros was practically ruined, so he decided to rent his studios to other producers.

Although he had also directed the animated short Cuento de Navidad (1934) with guitarist Daniel Fortea for Ballesteros, Sáenz de Heredia had remained on the streets. But he went to visit Luis Buñuel , who at that time had immense prestige as the director of the surrealist Un perro andaluz , and had become head of production at the Filmófono studios. Arguing that he had experience as a director, Sáenz de Heredia offered to film whatever was needed. The Aragonese put him to co-direct with the playwright Nemesio M. Sobrevila the notable La hija de Juan Simón, about a man in love with an undertaker’s daughter despite her mother’s opposition. Buñuel himself took part briefly as an actor, and unofficially filmed a sequence, for which Sáenz de Heredia learned numerous tricks of the trade. The film was a huge success, and in fact a remake was shot many years later with Antonio Molina .

The budding filmmaker’s career was interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War. At the beginning of the war, he was captured by communist militiamen and was about to be shot, due to his relationship with José Antonio Primo de Rivera. His boss, Luis Buñuel, interceded for him, who remembers the dramatic episode in “My last breath”, his memoir. The director of Viridiana testified in his favor, and got everyone who worked with him to come to argue that he was a great person and that he had treated them with enormous professionalism. Throughout the years, Sáenz de Heredia always maintained a friendship with Buñuel, who, although he went into exile in Mexico, visited him when he traveled to Spain.

He spent the rest of the war aligned with the national side, and rose to the rank of lieutenant. When the conflict ended, he resumed his career as a documentary director and also shot the comedy A mí no mire usted , which had Fernando Rey as a supporting actor . Francisco Franco himself chose him to take Raza to the cinema , a film that synthesizes his thoughts and the ideology of his regime. It is based on a plot by Franco, who appears in the credits under the pseudonym Jaime de Andrade, while Sáenz de Heredia wrote the technical script. It was a very important film in its time, it turned Alfredo Mayo , José Nieto and Ana Mariscal into top stars of Spanish cinema, and although his Manichaeism is evident (his characters are either national or red) it is also true that Sáenz de Heredia excelled as a filmmaker, especially in the sequence of the execution of the monks.

Since then he became an official filmmaker of the regime. He held various positions, as director of the Film School, and had to film – despite himself – the hagiographic documentary Franco, that man .

In 1945 he married María Ascensión Casado Iturbide. One of his sons, Ricardo Sáenz de Heredia, tried to make a career in the cinema, but did not go beyond being an assistant director in various films by his father. In turn, this is the father of Rodrigo Sáenz de Heredia , an actor who starred in La mitad de Óscar . It is necessary to mention that a nephew of the person in charge of Race , Álvaro Sáenz de Heredia , has made his fortune as a director of very commercial films such as Aquí huele a muerto , with Tuesdays and 13.

Among the best works by José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, the ghostly comedy El destinio apologisa stands out , with Fernando Fernán Gómez , also at his command in the memorable La mies es mucha . Mariona Rebull , an adaptation of a novel by Ignasi Agustí , is also of great interest . He directed Francisco Rabal and American star Merle Oberon in Anything Is Possible in Granada , loosely based on a short story by Washington Irving . And he had an impressive box office success with the emotional Historias de la radio, a tribute to the golden age of Spanish radio broadcasting, with the participation of some of the greats of the microphone, such as Bobby Deglané, and which was made up of several memorable segments. Years later, Sáenz de Heredia himself filmed a kind of deteriorated sequel, Historias de la televisión .

In the last stage of his filmography, he succumbed to commerciality, and shot very popular titles, especially with his fetish actress, Concha Velasco , such as the musical La verbena de la Paloma , or the comedy La decente , an adaptation of the work by Miguel Mihura ; She also signed several of the films of this actress with Manolo Escobar : Juicio de faldas , But… in what country do we live? or You owe me a dead man . He is also responsible for Don Erre that erre and the nativity scene was set up! , two of Paco Martínez Soria ‘s biggest hits , and after the interestingProceso a Jesús , based on a text by Diego Fabbri , said goodbye to the big screen asscribing to ‘landismo’ with Solo ante el Streaking , one of the most representative titles of Alfredo Landa . He died in his hometown on November 4, 1992, as a result of bronchopneumonia.