La culminación de la mirada crispada, violenta y popular de Fernando Rey: «El mundo sigue» (1963)

Fernán-Gómez’s work as director has a wide variety of influences: the literary tradition of the sainete and the costumbrismo of authors such as Arniches or Fernández Flórez, Spanish filmmakers he worked with such as Neville, Serrano de Osma or Saenz de Heredia, and last but not least Italian Neorealism, which Fernán-Gómez introduced into Spain even before the famous Conversaciones de Salamanca. His role in Berlanga’s Esa pareja feliz showed him a way to create a fusion of comedy, realism and formal experiments, which can be observed in his early works like La vida por delante. The result is a very personal and irregular style in which popular genres merge with a critical eye and the formal boldness of an auteur. In his masterpiece, El mundo sigue, Fernán-Gómez goes one step further and develops a tense perspective and a violent filmic écriture in order to draw an unadorned picture of Madrid’s postwar popular classes.