EUGENIO MARTÃN: UN AUTOR PARA TODOS LOS GÉNEROS
By Carlos Aguilar & Anita Haas
Retroback & Séptimo Vicio
143 pages
€15.00, plus p&p
By John Exshaw
Following their excellent John Phillip Law: Diabolik Angel (see review here), authors Carlos Aguilar and Anita Haas have turned their attention to an interesting, if rather less well-known, figure of Sixties’ and Seventies’ European popular cinema, the Spanish director Eugenio MartÃn. Best known abroad for two stupendously awful Euro Westerns, Bad Man’s River and Pancho Villa (both 1971) and that perennial late-night favourite, Horror Express (1972), MartÃn may seem rather unlikely material for a book-length study, but, as suggested by its title, Eugenio MartÃn: un autor para todos los géneros (roughly, ‘Eugenio MartÃn: An Author for Every Genre’), it is his work in a wide variety of genres, and particularly his career as a gun-for-hire throughout Spain’s peak years as a low-cost location for international co-productions, that should prove of interest to readers of Cinema Retro.
At which point, a word of warning – unlike Diabolik Angel, which has text in both Spanish and English, Eugenio MartÃn has Spanish text only. Published in conjunction with the Retroback Classic Cinema Festival of Granada (see Anita’s report for Cinema Retro by clicking here), this obvious drawback as far as non-Spanish-speaking readers is concerned is to a large extent negated by the mass of production stills and posters which illustrate the book.