Spanish asylum: : Fernando Fernán-Gómez’s eccentric debut as a film director adapting Gómez de la Serna, Poe, Kuprin and Andreiev (Manicomio, 1953)

Abstract

In 1953, in full intellectual maturity and when he is one of the most famous actors in Spain, Fernando Fernán-Gómez —whose centenary of his birth is celebrated in 2021—- makes his debut as a film director with Manicomio, a movie as modest as it is eccentric that brings together four stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Aleksadr Ivanovich Kuprin, Leonidas Andreiev and Ramón Gómez de la Serna in their first film adaptation (“La mona de imitación”). In the film, Fernán-Gómez draws a metaphorical drawing as dark as it is disjointed of a deranged Spain in which madmen rule, while intellectuals —like the unforgettable Camilo José Cela— kick like donkeys locked in a huthouse. One can already sense in the text, more or less incipient, sainetescos and deforming stylistic features —the protagonist (Fernán-Gómez himself) speaking to the spectators; the costumbrista  but distorting tone of the Ramonian episode starring Antonio Vico and Elvira Quintillá— which will constitute the bases of future style of the author of El mundo sigue (1963) or El extraño viaje (1964).