Mariano Ozores

Born on October 5, 1926, Mariano Ozores Puchol from Madrid belongs to one of the most famous clans in Spanish cinema, being the son of actors Mariano Ozores Francés and Luisa Puchol Butier , brother of fellow performers José Luis Ozores (who died prematurely at age 45 due to multiple sclerosis) and Antonio Ozores , and uncle of Adriana Ozores and Emma Ozores. He spends his childhood behind the scenes, curtains and stages, and although at first he tries to follow the family tradition, dedicating himself to interpretation, he lacks the spark and naturalness of his relatives, so he prefers to carry out other trades (representative, prompter, councilor and stagehand), and in the end he publishes humorous writings for the legendary magazine “La Codorniz”.

In 1953, Mariano Ozores made his debut on the big screen, contributing additional dialogues to the script of ¡Ché, qué loco! , a comedy by Ramón Torrado , and he already appears accredited as a scriptwriter in Susana y yo , from 1957. With the start of RTVE transmissions in 1956, he directs and presents programs such as Aeropuerto Telefunken . In 1959, he debuted as a director with Las dos y media y… veneno , co-written with the prolific playwright Alfonso Paso and starring his brothers, José Luis y Antonio , and Elisa Montés ., wife of the latter. All three, or some of them, reappear in comedies from the first stage of her filmography, such as Somersault , La alteza de ella la niña and Alegre juventud .

The trio of actors is also present in Mariano Ozores ‘ best work as a scriptwriter and director, the science fiction drama La hora incógnita . Filmed in 1963, a year after the Cuban missile crisis, it starts from the premise that the US army loses a nuclear missile due to a breakdown that is heading for the typical Spanish town. The inhabitants are evacuated, but thirteen people who have remained for various reasons meet with the priest in the church. Until Antonio Ozore she is more or less convincing in one of his few serious roles. Unfortunately, it fails miserably, and the production company created by Ozores, La Hispánica, goes bankrupt. “We had made three or four movies that did very well,” he recalls with some bitterness. “Then I believed Lubitsch and said:” Now we are going to make a serious, good, important, fat film. All right, The Unknown Hour  was a critical success. But it meant complete economic ruin. At a time when a movie cost a million, ours cost four. Since then I promised myself that I would only make the film that the public wanted to see and liked. I don’t give a damn, do you understand?

If the filmmaker had continued down that path, perhaps he would have achieved a place among the greats of our cinema. But comedy gave more money to Spanish cinema at that time, so afterwards it does not detach itself from the genre. She has the priceless José Luis López Vázquez and Gracita Morales under her command , in Chica para todo , with the actress in her typical role as a small-town girl who comes to the capital to work as a maid. Both repeat with Mariano Ozores in How is the service! , Operation Mata Hari , Operation Secretary , Chronicle of nine months , 40 degrees in the shade , If Fulano were Menganoand the hilarious James Bond film parody Target: BI-KI-Ni . With Manolo Escobar , he signs En un lugar de la Manga and A mí las mujeres ni fu ni fa , with Concha Velasco Susana , Venta por pios and other titles, and at the service of the popular Lina Morgan he shoots Dos chicas de revista, La decarriada, A nun and a Don Juan , and also The Graduate and They Called Her The Godmother , inspired by the hit Hollywood films The Graduate and The Godfather . There is no lack of a film with Paco Martínez Soria ,The henpecked , from 1974.

In 1957, Mariano Ozores married actress Teresa Arcos, also from the world of show business, being the daughter of an actor and a dancer. They had a daughter, also Teresa like her mother, a businesswoman in the hospitality sector. In 1964, he directed a film exalting the Franco regime, Morir en España , and served as second unit director of Franco, that man . Later he has always avoided positioning himself in politics, and has a film with autobiographical features, El apolítico , with José Luis López Vázquezas a businessman who is not convinced by any voting option. There he advocates for the union of all Spaniards, while he puts wax on tax evaders. He has always been critical of subsidies. “To me, what some directors say about shooting the film for them and then, if the public doesn’t want to see them, go ahead, it seems like a fraud to me. This can be done with one’s own money, not with that of others”, he explained in an interview with David Trueba , when he was studying journalism.

“Why do they call it Landismo? It should be Ozorismo”, pointed out from the airwaves the critic Carlos Pumares, who defended that if the comedies starring Alfredo Landa became very popular, the credit should be given to Mariano Ozores . He is right, because he is behind several of his biggest hits, Manolo, la nuit , Jenaro el de los 14 , Sleeping and flirting: everything is starting , Butler for everything , Uncle, do they really come from Paris? , Celedonio and I are like that , and up to Naked Weekend and The Sins of an Almost Decent Girl , where in an “even more difficult” Landa was paired with the aforementionedLina Morgan .

At the end of the 70s, the most shameful and dandruff stage of Mariano Ozores began . It all started when gambling was legalized in Spain, and the wife of José María Reyzábal, in charge of Ízaro Films, became fond of bingo. So the businessman saw a gold mine, and recruited Ozores to direct Los bingueros , which brought together for the first time two comedians with pull at that time, Andrés Pajares and Fernando Esteso . With their risqué jokes, and the exhibition of actresses from the Destape era, they were sweeping the box office, so the filmmaker repeated with the duo in the films of the same company Los energégicos , Yo hice a Roque III (cañí version of Rockywhich is funny, and which caused the premiere of The Empire Strikes Back to be delayed, so as not to coincide on billboards!), Los liantes , Los chulos , Todos al suelo , Padre no hay más que dos (family comedy without green humour, with the members of the Parchís group), Shake before using it and La Lola takes us to the garden .

The nine titles reached a million spectators (everything indicates more or less the same types), and they were filmed without subsidies and at full speed. “We had four weeks to shoot. We went so fast that sometimes we moved our mouths without saying anything and then we would put some joke in the dubbing studio, “said Esteso, who also commented that the usual secondary Antonio Ozores ” did not learn the dialogues. That’s why he spoke like that. He was a delicious bum.”

“Cinema can be a vehicle for thinking, but I am not part of that vehicle”, clarifies Ozores, who also made a film with Esteso alone, such as El currante  or El hijo del cura  and with Pajares without his partner, as Cristóbal Columbus, by trade… discoverer , which led to the fact that when the actor came across Camilo José Cela , he scolded him because he had crushed the adaptation of La colmena at the box office . “In any case, I’m sure yours is more fun,” the Nobel Prize for Literature finally told him.

“We left it because we were making the same film with different scripts”, Fernando Esteso later explained . For his part, Andrés Pajares acknowledges that he felt “healthy envy” that Alfredo Landa and Paco Rabal won the acting award at Cannes for Los santos inocentes , so he embarked on a serious career. In reality, the era of the Uncovering was over –although it took a long time to disappear– and those kinds of films stopped making sense, if they ever did. Out of fashion, Mariano Ozores now only achieves minor success, especially in video stores, with some title, such as No daughter, no! ,with Antonio leading the cast. He is in charge of the television series Taller Mecánico and El sexólogo , which shows that his type of humor had been outdated in 1994. With phrases like “All women carry a whore inside”, pronounced by the character of Florinda Chico , receives criticism from some deputy, the Comisiones Obreras union and the Women’s Institute, for which Jordi García Candau, director of RTVE, withdraws it from the programming hours before the third episode was broadcast (later it would be broadcast in its entirety by Antena 3 ). And the filmmaker retires.

Despite everything, this filmmaker should not be relegated to oblivion. Jesús Franco is consideredthe most prolific director of Spanish cinema, but he should be disqualified. “The pornographic films of him would have to be discounted, which are shot at the same time,” argues Ozores himself. So this position is held by him, with 94 feature films and three series to his credit. Tireless worker, while he shoots he writes the script for his next film. How is it achieved? “Well, look, first being a man like me, who likes his profession,” he once replied. “I don’t go to meetings, I don’t go to party rooms, I don’t go to cocktail parties because they bore me a lot. What I like is to be at home. So, I stay at home, read, watch TV and write. I work a lot, but it’s not my merit, it’s just that I have fun”. In 2016, the Film Academy awarded him the Goya de Honor, along with his brothers, José Luis and Antonio, both posthumously.