Arruza

Arruza (1972)

He Was Number One - THE BEST...And He Died That Way!

Eight years in the making, Boetticher’s portrait of his longtime friend, the famous bullfighter Carlos Arruza, was a labor of love that the renowned director of westerns pursued despite contending with illnesses, bankruptcy, jail time, and lucrative offers from Hollywood. The result is an astonishing work of poetry, immediacy, and violence that fearlessly wrestles with the filmmaker’s own ambivalence about the titular matador’s triumphs prior to his death by automobile accident at the age of 46.

Date of release
1972-08-23
TMDB
6.8 / 10 (4)
Runtime
1h 13m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Budd Boetticher

Casting

Interesting facts

Arruza is a 1968 documentary film about Carlos Arruza directed by Budd Boetticher. It took 10 years to be completed.

Production

Boetticher left Hollywood at the height of his success to make a film about Arruza. "I wanted to do something nobody else in the world could do," he says. "I thought, 'I'll make a picture about bullfighting, and I'll use Carlos playing himself.' ... I had to do that picture.

He recalled, "It should have been just a short project, but it turned into a seven-year nightmare."

Production started May 5, 1958 and took 10 years to complete. Boetticher spent the first three years filming bullfights with Lucien Ballard and Carlos Carbajal.

During filming, Boetticher fought with the Mexican government and unions; ran out of money twice (once in 1961); was evicted from hotels; and put into prison and a sanatorium. Arruza died in May 1966. Following a surge in interest in Arruza, John Sturges acquired a 25% interest in the film in 1967 to enable the film to be completed, with Arruza's heirs owning 30% and Boetticher the rest. Crone, the editor, died in June 1966.

Jason Robards performed the initial narration but another version features Anthony Quinn.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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