In Spain as in France, the end-of-year celebrations are often the occasion to see great classics again, those old timeless films that the television channels broadcast every December. Life is Beautiful by Frank Capra, for example. During one of these reruns, Spaniards realized that they were watching a censored version during Franco’s time, 46 years after the dictator’s death.
It is the president of an association of homage to the Spanish Republicans, the ARMH, who raised the alert. Emilio Silva was watching the film on his sofa, when he realizes that the voices of the characters are changing. He sees a scene he had never seen in this film: the one where the characters, until then abused by a sleep seller, become owners of their homes thanks to a solidarity cooperative. This scene had been deemed subversive by the Franco regime, a little too egalitarian, a little too critical of the banks, in short, it was a little too reminiscent of the ideals of the Communists. The sequence was therefore passed by the trap, and obviously no chain had so far had the idea of recovering it.
The list of films affected by this censorship is long: Casablanca, Mogambo, The Lady of Shanghai, Alamo. Censorship was sometimes linked to political opinions, or to allusions to the Second Spanish Republic.
In Casablanca the character of Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, is in the middle of a discussion with Victor Lazslo, the Czech resistance fighter who wants to win his favor. In the original version, Lazslo tells Rick: “You fought in Ethiopia, you fought fascism in Spain”. In the version censored by Francoism, this line becomes: “You delivered weapons to Ethiopia, you fought against the Austrian Anschluss”. Fascism in Spain never existed, Rick never fought it, he was busy fighting against the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, with which after World War II Franco sought to take its distances.
The ARMH calls on the Spanish government to create a commission to make an inventory of the damage caused by censorship, and of works still broadcast in their censored version. It’s not just movies, books by Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell are still being censored. The editors never thought of publishing in their original version the works of these two writers who wrote respectively on the Spanish Civil War For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Tribute to Catalonia !
The association asks the authorities to identify and then work on the restitution of works so that the Spaniards can finally, in 2022, have access to these films and books as they were conceived by their creators.