Institute History
Description
When it was first released in 1951 at 87 minutes, The Bullfighter and the Lady appeared to have too much of the lady and not enough of the bulls. In fact, some 40 minutes had been cut from the film, much of it having to do with the training of matadors and of the bullfights themselves. The UCLA Film and Television Archive located much of the missing footage in a Spanish language version preserved by the Library of Congress. In this meticulous re-creation, final editing of which was approved by Boetticher, The Bullfighter and the Lady now emerges as one of the finest studies of this venerable pageant-theater-religion-spectacle ever filmed.
Robert Stack stars as the American who travels to Mexico to learn the true art of bullfighting, hoping to win, in the process, the love of a beautiful senorita. But stealing the show are Gilbert Roland and the aging Mexican bullfighters who, with immense dignity and passion, instruct the young American. The Bullfighter and the Lady has already carved out a niche in the memories of those who came to it at an impressionable age. It lives again, better and stronger, as the director’s original cut.