The Crack & Crack Cero
    
 
El Crack
Director:  Jose Luis Garci
Year: 1981
Country: Spain
Rating: 7.5


The film begins with a thanks to Dashiell Hammett. There is a missing girl and her father hires a detective to find her. It has been two years. A long time to track down a girl and the detective tells him that he will give it five days and if he and his employee The Arab find nothing, he will drop the case. As in every detective novel from Hammett to Chandler to MacDonald to Spillane it is never that simple. The further he digs the dirtier it gets, the more pressure is brought on him to walk away. Just walk away. Take a job in America. But like in every detective novel, he can't. The father is dying from cancer, he wants to say goodbye. He keeps digging through the dirt, the corruption, the dingy urban landscape, the bars and massage parlors, the streets reflecting the neon lights, the informers. It could have been Los Angeles but it's not. It is Madrid, five years after Franco died and everywhere you look the city looks as if it almost died as well with paint peeling on the grand buildings to the rundown cinemas. A city just coming out of the coma of Franco.

 
 
Germán (Alfredo Landa) is an ex-cop - called The Louse while working there. A cop during the Franco years. Now he and The Arab take on anything that walks through the door - divorces, cheating husbands, cheating wives, industrial espionage, missing girls. They both know their way around the city - which peepholes to look through, which alleys to be careful of. In the opening scene the character of Germán is set up. He is having a late night dinner in a small bar/restaurant when two toughs walk in and demand everyone's money. Germán just keeps eating - ignoring the men - the two rattle a few cages and then come to him - he keeps eating. Hey old man give us your money. I have a gun pointed at your balls. Get out while you still have them. Never a voice raised, no heroics - just a don't mess with me sign on him. The film is like his character - if it had a pulse it was even all the way through. Never raised in excitement. With his plain sedate face, thick moustache and medium stature you might mistake him for a taxi driver or a butcher. But when one fellow puts his finger on his shoulder, Germán says simply "your finger". The finger again. Your finger. A second later the fellow is on the ground doubled up in pain. No, not, a taxi driver.

 

The film takes its time - he has the beginning of a romance going with a woman who has an adorable little girl. Every day he goes to an old-fashioned barber for a shave. The barber has a love for Rocky Marciano and delivers a hit by hit re-play of matches from years ago - against Jersey Joe Walcott and Archie Moore. He could have beaten Ali don't you think? When Germán doesn't back down they strike at him - hurt someone he cares about - they may as well have signed their death warrant. This was a big hit and there was a El Crack Dos - which I have found but can't locate sub-titles. Just placing this in Madrid and hearing it in Spanish gives it another layer of interest,

 
El Crack Cero aka The Crack: Inception
Director:  Jose Luis Garci
Year: 1981
Country: Spain
Rating: 7.5


Eighteen years after José Luis Garci directed his biggest hit, El Crack in 1981, he returns to the same character and produces a prequel to that film. There is also a sequel titled El Crack Dos in 1983 but I have not found a version with subs. In El Crack we met private eye Areta who fell very much into the tradition of tough, ethical, never give up detectives that came out of the books of Hammett and Chandler. A little grungier than Spade and Marlowe but just as hard who could follow a clue and a killer to the end. This is a character that Garci seems comfortable with. His attempt at a Sherlock Holmes film - Holmes & Watson: Madrid Days - was dreadful. But Areta feels as familiar as a favorite record because in a sense we have seen him so often with different names.

 

He is shinier here than in the 1981 version. Death hasn't come his way as often. An ex-cop he has set up a small agency with his secretary and assistant Moro (who is a character in the first one). The nice thing about prequels is that you know he is going to survive; but you also have a sense of who isn't. Generalissimo Franco is really dying this time but though everyone has heard gossip that he is nearing the end, no one wants to talk about it yet. Ears are everywhere and you don't know who can be trusted. It is 1975. Six years before the original. Every day an older friend comes to his office to talk about Rocky Marciano. In the first film he is Areta's barber. Areta tells him better times are coming soon.

 

It is a literate script with references to Somerset Maugham, Joan Crawford, Eric Burden and The Count of Monte Cristo. It is also a homage to noir from the past - shot in black and white, nighttime scenes, pool halls and at one point when he questions the killer, there is an art figure of Humphrey Bogart in his trench coat standing in the corner seemingly giving him his approval for what he is about to do.  It is dedicated to James Cain. In the first two films dedications went to Hammett and Chandler. The film is very low-key - just him and his assistant questioning people, looking for lies. A few cases are put in front of him but the main one is when a beautiful woman comes to ask him to investigate the death of a friend that was ruled a suicide. She doesn't believe it and he took out life insurance for a group of people he owed money to. His death made them well-off. One of them is a killer.