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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
If you are looking for a masterpiece, Abajo los hombres is definitly not it. But if you have a soft spot for dusty, chaotic 1930s Spanish comedies where everyone screams their lines, you might actually have some fun. 🎬
Anyone expecting a polished Hollywood musical will absolutely hate this. It is loud, the sound quality feels like it was recorded inside a tin can, and the plot gets lost about twenty minutes in.
So, the whole setup is about a bunch of women who decide they are completely done with men. They form this "Down with Men" club, which leads to a lot of theatrical hand-waving and very silly musical numbers.
It has that weird, frantic energy you sometimes see in early talkies like John Ford's Up the River. Nobody seems to know where to look, so they just look everywhere at once.
I watched this on a blurry digital copy that looked like it was rescued from someone's damp basement. Honestly, the grime kind of adds to the charm.
There is this one scene where Carmelita Aubert starts singing, and the camera just panics. It wobbles to the left, then to the right, almost like the cameraman fell asleep for a second. 😴
"Down with men! But also, let us sing about them for three minutes."
The guy playing the lead, Pierre Clarel, has this incredibly bouncy mustache. I spent more time watching his facial hair twitch than listening to what he was actually saying.
He has this physical comedy style that feels a bit like the silent era, reminding me a little of the goofy detectives in Partners in Crime. It is very broad, very sweaty, and very loud.
The music is actually kind of catchy, even if the lyrics are completely absurd. One song just repeats the same phrase over and over until it gets stuck in your head like a bad commercial.
There is a moment near the middle where a dog wanders into the background of a shot. Nobody stops filming, they just let the dog do its thing. I respect that.
The editing is incredibly choppy. Sometimes a character starts a sentence in one room and finishes it in another with no explanation of how they got there.
It is definitely a relic of a very specific time in Spanish cinema, right before everything changed. It is not great art, but it is a fascinating piece of history that does not take itself seriously at all.
Should you watch it? Only if you are a film nerd who likes digging up obscure things. Otherwise, you will probably be bored out of your mind within ten minutes.
