Fri Mar 30, 2012 7:18 pm
There was never a slap. What did happen was a harsh discussion between the two women on the set according to everybody that was there. The reason was that Eva constantly arrived late to the studio that, after a while, infuriated Libertad Lamarque who was a professional and always on time. Hugo del Carril, who was a friend of both of them, had to quiet the whole thing.
The story of the slap was invented after Perón was ousted from power in 1955 and Libertad Lamarque told exactly what happened many times throughout the years on live television.
This film , by the way, is a masterpiece. It tells the story of the decadence of the circus when motion pictures appeared. Director Mario Soffici was a great filmmaker and his best films were those in which he had absolute control of the proceedings as writer, producer, and occasionally actor. The majority of his films, where he was only a director for hire, are mediocre or bad although he probably improved things a bit. But all of those films in which he had creative control (this one, BARRIO GRIS, ROSAURA A LAS DIEZ, EL EXTRAÑO CASO DEL HOMBRE Y LA BESTIA, PRISIONEROS DE LA TIERRA, KILOMETRO 11, etc.) are all sublime.
I could create English subtitles for the film myself; but that is a very difficult and professional task. A copy of the master tape of this film (which is the public domain like the big majority in Argentina) is preserved by Warner Bros. which acquired it when they purchased a series of cable channels to be replaced with lousy pan regional versions of American channels, like the Latin American version of TCM, which is horrible.
TCM can perfectly show this film.
