A Compadecida (1969)

English title: Our Lady of Compassion.

Based on the play O Auto da Compadecida, by Ariano Suassuna, written in 1955 and first staged in 1956.

Two small-town bakery employees, one a trickster and the other his simple-minded sidekick, go through several incidents as a gang of bandits raid the town in a murdering frenzy.

Botched theatrical adaptation, with no sense of narrative and poorly designed cinematic sequences. It has a lot of competent artists working in it, as cenographer, cinematographer, etc., and that shows, but a good crew a good film does not make; it takes a good screenplay and a competent diretor, both of which seem to be missing here. The storyline could be divided into two sections, the first of which is a picaresque sequence of events, and the second of which invokes the supernatural to convey a socially-updated re-reading of Christianity, with a preachy undertone to it. The Internet Movie Database hilariously merges two people into a single entity under the name George Jonas. One is this film's diretor, who was a Hungarian-born man established in Brazil in the celluloid processing business and later as a producer of TV advertising. The other is his much more famous namesake, who was also Hungarian-born but established himself in Canada as a journalist.

Some internet links about the Brazilian guy: on his book of memoirs and on his death.

Rating: 32