Berlanga, Fernán Gómez and the path towards a popular, crusty and grotesque Iberian modernity

The revisiting of Spanish Republican cinema, as well as that produced in the first post-war decades, carried out since the end of the last century by a new historiography that uses film analysis as an unavoidable methodological weapon, constitutes the starting point to delve into the deep parallels and intertwining of the trajectories of two of the most relevant masters of Hispanic cinema: Luis García Berlanga and Fernando Fernán Gómez, both born in 1921. In this line, this work offers analytical paths that allow a better understanding of the difficult but decisive path they took – each in their own way – from the sainete to the esperpento and which, starting from the comic “slightly curved mirror” of Wenceslao Fernández Flórez, will reach the extreme concavity of the Valleinclanesque Callejón del Gato in his great films of the 1960s. Along the way, the literary works of Carlos Arniches and the aforementioned Galician writer were some of the pillars on which to build a fertile Hispanic and everyday realism, at once comic, dark and truthful about the misery of the life of the “poor Spanish people”, bringing to light the age-old scourges and backwardness of our country.