Synopsis
Welcome Mr. Marshall! (¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall!, 1953) is a Spanish comedy by Luis García Berlanga you can watch online on iFILM. A drowsy Castilian village, Villar del Río, gets word that an American delegation tied to the Marshall Plan is about to roll through.
So the town reinvents itself overnight. The mayor, the shopkeeper, the teacher and the priest decide to dazzle their visitors — but the Americans, they assume, expect "real Spain," meaning Andalusia. Out come the flamenco dresses, a hired singer, freshly painted facades and a rehearsed welcome no Castilian peasant would recognize. Each villager privately dreams up the gift the visitors will surely leave: a tractor, a sewing machine, a way out.
Berlanga co-wrote the script with Juan Antonio Bardem, the two men who would go on to define postwar Spanish cinema. Behind a gentle village farce sits a sharp jab at Franco-era provincialism and at the wishful courting of America, and the film took a prize at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival. The satire is warm, the ending quietly deflating, and the whole thing ages beautifully. Stream Welcome Mr. Marshall! (1953) online on iFILM.
Starring
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