original production:

EL HOMBRE
Y EL MONSTRUO

Cast: Abel Salazar (Ricardo), Enrique Rambal (as "Henry Rambal") (Samuel), Martha Roth (Laura/Alejandra/Blonde Motorist), Ofelia Guilmain (doña Cornelia/Mother), José Chávez (Trowel, Police Inspector), Maria Roth, Carlos Suárez (Cosme), Mari Carmen Vela (blonde), Anita Blanch, Ana Laura Baledón (little girl), Armando Gutiérrez (hotel mgr.), Jesús Gómez (policeman), María Cecilia Leger (woman in conservatory)

PLOT OUTLINE:
(From IMDb): A failed pianist sells his soul to the devil in return for his becoming the greatest musician in the world. The catch: every time he plays he turns into a horrible monster.

(From AFI): Concert manager Dick Sandrow is told by famed musician Samuel Manning that his protege, Laura, is destined to become the world's greatest pianist, Although he suspects that the musician is responsible for the death in an automobile accident of Alexandra, another pianist, Dick is unaware that Manning has sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for success. As a result of this pact, Manning is transformed into a raving monster whenever a certain tune is played on the piano. Hoping to confirm his suspicions, Dick instructs Laura to play the haunting melody. Manning, metamorphosized into the monster, attempts to attack Laura and is shot to death.

GUEST SYNOPSIS:
by David Wilt:
EL HOMBRE Y EL MONSTRUO begins with a pre-credits sequence (an ABSA trademark) in which a young blonde woman wrecks her car and seeks aid at a forbidding house, only to scream in horror at something the audience is not shown. Afterwards, she staggers back to the road, her face bloody, and collapses. She is found by Ricardo, who seeks help at the house (he thinks she was hurt in the car accident) but is refused entry by doña Cornelia.

The film is constructed somewhat along the lines of a Gothic mystery. The inhabitants of the old house are Samuel, a middle-aged man, his mother (doña Cornelia), and the attractive Laura, who is being groomed by Samuel to be a concert pianist. Samuel has a "problem" which is alluded to by himself and his mother. Ricardo visits the house the next day: he is a representative from the entrepreneurs who are going to sponsor Laura's concert debut. Samuel is also a well-known pianist, but hasn't played in public for years (although Laura later tells Ricardo that she hears Samuel playing, but only at night).

When Samuel wants to play the piano, he locks himself in the music room and tosses the keys out through a window. One night, Ricardo sneaks into the house and goes into the deserted music room. He finds a woman's dead body sitting in an alcove, a roll of sheet music in her hand. Taking the music, Ricardo leaves, but he is observed by doña Cornelia.

Doña Cornelia tells Samuel what occurred. In flashback, Samuel's story is finally revealed. While listening to Alejandra play in concert, Samuel says he would sell his soul to become the greatest pianist in the world. Visiting Alejandra in her dressing room, Samuel murders her and takes her body back to his house. He begins to play some mysterious sheet music that Alejandra had found, and turns into a hairy monster with fangs (and a BIG nose). Doña Cornelia is shocked to see him, and it is only then that Samuel realizes what has befallen him. However, the joy of being the greatest pianist in the world overcomes his horror. Later, he passes out and returns to normal, then awakes and remembers nothing. Years pass.

Back in the present, Samuel (in monster form) goes to Ricardo's hotel room to kill him and retrieve the music. Ricardo has changed rooms, and the monster murders an innocent man, then bursts into the lobby and struggles with Ricardo and the hotel manager before escaping with the sheet music. Back at his house, Samuel decides to kill Laura (because she is getting too good at the piano), and chases her around the house before doña Cornelia intervenes. Laura still doesn't realize that the monster is Samuel.

Ricardo brings the police to the house, but it is empty. Even Alejandra's body is gone. Samuel, doña Cornelia and Laura have gone to the city to prepare for Laura's concert. At the conservatory of music where the concert will take place, Samuel wanders into a room and sees a little girl playing the piano. She asks him for help, but when he plays he turns into a monster and kills her (off-screen). He then reverts to normality. Samuel hopes that Laura's musical career will lift the curse that Alejandra's murder caused (he has apparently cremated her body, since he has part of a skull and ashes in a small casket with the sheet music). Samuel tries to burn the music, but is distracted, and Ricardo saves it.

Samuel is conducting the orchestra for Laura's concert. Before she goes on, Ricardo gives Laura the music and asks her to play it. She does, and Samuel turns into a monster on stage. He tries to kill Laura, and struggles with Ricardo, before he is shot to death by the police. In death, his appearance returns to normal.

GUEST REVIEW:
by David Wilt
If ONLY the monster makeup for Enrique Rambal had been decent! Or at least not laughable! The makeup is so poorly-designed that it blights the entire film, which is otherwise quite good. The sets and photography are atmospheric, the acting is competent, and Baledón's direction is excellent. For example, when Samuel visits Alejandra in her dressing room, she shows him the sheet music she found. There is a nice shot of Alejandra's hand mirror with a pair of scissors on it, resting on her dressing table. Samuel's face and the back of Laura's head can be seen in the mirror. As he murders her, this shot is repeated, a very oblique and disorienting way of showing the killing (he cuts her throat with the scissors, although this isn't obvious until the next scene, when her corpse is placed in an armchair in Samuel's house, and the throat wound is clearly seen). Baledón is also capable of building up suspense and then delivering shocks, as in the scene where Ricardo and the police enter the music room. They nervously open the door to the alcove where Alejandra's body rests, and a black cat suddenly leaps out (the body is gone).

There are, in addition to the disastrous monster makeup, a few flaws in the film, but most are not serious. For instance, in one closeup shot Martha Roth--playing the mummified Alejandra--clearly blinks, but nobody thought that was worth a retake. Logically, there are a few problems. For instance, if Samuel turns into a monster when he plays the piano, how did he become so famous that Ricardo knew about him? (Maybe he was a pretty good pianist before he sold his soul, but that isn't the impression we get) Also, it is clearly implied in the first transformation sequence that when Samuel becomes the monster he is not Samuel, but rather has been possessed by the Devil, and Samuel has no memory of the events that occurred while he was in monster form. And yet Samuel wants to keep playing the piano (why? if he wasn't conscious while doing it and couldn't even remember it afterwards) and the monster enjoys playing the piano (if he's really the Devil, then why? It was Samuel's wish to be the greatest pianist in the world, not the devil's)

But such problems aside, EL HOMBRE Y EL MONSTRUO is really an excellent film with one big drawback--that stupid makeup.

REVIEW:
THE MAN AND THE MONSTER is a most interesting and unusual part of the Murray horror canon, as it combines elements of gothic horror, murder mystery and psychological drama, overlapping these themes into a broad interpretation of Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde".

The dynamic opening teaser, in which a cheap blonde cracks up her car and ends up at the house of a musical madman, creates an air of both mystery and terror. She screams, and we cut to the main title, in a most engaging segway.

Abel Salazar is fine doing his patented "Everyman" character, but the real star of this show is Enrique Rambal, whose portrayal of Samuel, the tortured, compromised genius is powerful and believable, dripping with genuine pathos.

He's more afraid of his mother than he is of the devil (who ain't?) and his pathetic submission to the hardy, wicked forces that control him is truly touching.

The mother is admittedly a super-bitch: she berates and harasses him, and allows Samuel to keep a dead and decaying piano-chick propped up in a chair, as a constant reminder of crippling eternal loyalties and unquenchable grief.

Soon, we have a marvelous dream sequence/flashback where Samuel summons and propositions the dark one, on a wild, expressionist landscape.

Then, at the half-way mark, it happens: Man turns into Monster! Many have decried the primitive, Werewolfian monster make-up in this film, but it works quite well for the broad Jekyll & Hyde fable that is being told. With a more subdued disguise, this could have easily turned into a forgettable art allegory, like Cocteau's highly overrated BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. And don't forget, this is first and foremost, a monster movie!

Aside from the rather buffoonish dubbing of the breathy monster, the beast is essentially convincing. and evokes a fanciful, but not improbable, portrayal of creative madness.

(In all fairness, some long shots of the hairy artisan lurching about in string tie and cardigan DO kinda suggest Mister Rogers with a tequila hangover...)

Anyway, pathos and comic thrills wrestle with each other to form a most interesting little bit of foreign exotica.

A later scene, in which our favorite demonic ivory-tickler goes "ape" in front of a little girl, is alotta fun, and ripe with all sorts of perverse implications.

(The finale, in which our heroine plays the piano in concert, and summons our dear monster as she reaches "that certain passage," has unintended (?) comic impact, as one cannot help but be reminded of the classic Bugs Bunny cartoon, in which Yosemite Sam has wired explosives to a piano, intending Bugs to blow himself up while playing that old stand-by, "Those Endearing Young Charms." Of course, Bugs consistently hits the wrong note, until Sam butts in and shows him how to play the tune correctly, destroying himself in the process.)

Like many Mexican horror films of the period, TM&TM has a strange sense of anachronism. Modern clothing and vehicles place it in the present day, but everything else, including buildings and furnishings, as well as the Victorian atmosphere and the Poe-like veneer of creeping dread, seem at least a century older.

The film (almost successfully) tackles such issues as unhealthy compulsions, domineering parents, and the deadly pressures of creative genius, themes covered in many other films, some quite notable. Yet even with the comic book make-up and kooky dubbing, this is a better movie than SHINE! Yuck!

HEAR THE ORIGINAL PROMO SPOT!
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COMMENTS:
* (updated 02-14-06) Thanks to a terrific new book we just received, "Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold" by Kevin Heffernan, (2004, Duke University Press), we have been able to update the U.S. television release date for this Murray horror title to 1965. The appendices to this study of the horror film in America, circa 1955-1968, include complete listings of syndication feature film packages from many distributors, including American International Television, who subleased the K. Gordon Murray film catalog under the title THRILLERS FROM ANOTHER WORLD. It seems that 1965 was the watershed year for genre film sold to television, with a veritable flood of titles released by both domestic and foreign distribs.

* (effective 05-01-03) After a very brief window of availability, this long-sought K. Gordon Murray title is once again out of print, due to international copyright issues. Used video tapes of this title may be found on online video dealers and auction sites. Stay tuned for further developments!

* This was the third ABSA horror film, made after EL VAMPIRO and EL ATAUD DEL VAMPIRO. Those two films had been directed by Fernando Méndez, but Rafael Baledón took the directorial chair for this picture. Baledón has the reputation of having been a journeyman director who received a large number of assignments because he was a fast worker, but the two films he made for ABSA (this one and LA MALDICION DE LA LLORONA) are both extremely well-directed pictures, and a number of Baledón's other films (at least one of the "Jinete Solitario" Westerns and LA LOBA come to mind) are above-average. - David Wilt

NOTABLE DIALOGUE: