The Skeleton of Mrs. Morales
1960 · Rogelio A. González
A taxidermist decides to murder his wife after having to put up with her after twenty years of hellish marriage.
dir. Rogelio A. González · 1960
One of the blackest comedies Mexican cinema ever produced, and a late jewel of its Golden Age. Arturo de Córdova — normally the suave leading man of melodramas — plays Pablo Morales, a taxidermist trapped in twenty years of marriage to a pious, hypochondriac wife who weaponizes religion, illness and neighborhood gossip against him. His solution involves his professional skills. Rogelio A. González directs from a script by Luis Alcoriza, Buñuel's great Mexican collaborator, adapting Arthur Machen's story 'The Islington Mystery,' and the Buñuelian fingerprints are everywhere: the anticlerical needling, the savage portrait of bourgeois respectability, the sense that sainthood and cruelty can share a face. What elevates it is its moral vertigo — the film keeps daring you to sympathize with a murderer, then punishing you for it, right up to a final twist of the knife that Mexican audiences have been quoting for six decades. Long a word-of-mouth cult item, it now regularly tops polls of the greatest Mexican films, a skeleton the national cinema is proud to keep in its closet.
Lines of influence
- Monsieur Verdoux (1947) — Establishes the respectable bourgeois husband as methodical wife-killer, weaponizing domestic propriety as both alibi and the true satirical target — the template González and Alcoriza refit to a Mexican household.
- Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) — Renders murder as a drawing-room comedy of manners where impeccable etiquette and cool narration make the killing funnier and more damning, the tonal register Mrs. Morales inherits.
- Él (1953) — Casts Arturo de Córdova as the outwardly devout, inwardly monstrous bourgeois Catholic husband — the exact persona and matinee-idol-against-type deployment the taxidermist reprises.
- The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955) — Alcoriza's own script model: a Mexican black comedy about a genteel would-be murderer, its droll tone, fetishized objects, and matter-of-fact cruelty are the direct writing precedent.
- Los olvidados (1950) — Forged the Alcoriza–Buñuel method of observing cruelty without moralizing and centering unsympathetic protagonists, the amoral gaze Mrs. Morales turns on its own killer-hero.
- Shadow of a Doubt (1943) — Nests the charming killer inside respectable domesticity and builds toward the twist that murder hides behind the family table — the structural irony behind the film's final reveal.
- Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) — Perfects the domestic-space murder farce, concealing corpses within the genteel household as the primary comic engine, prefiguring the taxidermist's skeleton gambit.
- The Suspect (1944) — Frames a sympathetic husband driven to kill a shrewish, sanctimonious wife in period-melodrama register, the marital-entrapment-as-murder-motive Mrs. Morales darkens into comedy.
- The Trouble with Harry (1955) — Shares the deadpan control that treats a corpse as a mere domestic inconvenience, sustaining comedy over macabre material without tipping into horror.
- Macario (1960) — Same-year Mexican Golden Age literary adaptation fusing death, folk-Catholic morality, and moral irony, a parallel high-craft prestige treatment of mortality and piety.
- Viridiana (1961) — Mounts the same anticlerical assault on ostentatious piety and the theme of sainthood-as-cruelty, exposing sanctity's violence within a Hispanic production.
- Divorce Italian Style (1961) — Extends the black comedy of marital entrapment in which a respectable spouse plots murder to escape a suffocating marriage, mocking bourgeois honor via ironic narration.
- Landru (1963) — Stages Bluebeard as a fastidious bourgeois whose killings are choreographed with ironic domestic elegance, the same politesse-over-slaughter craft.
- The Exterminating Angel (1962) — Alcoriza co-scripts again to trap the respectable bourgeoisie and strip their manners to reveal savagery beneath, advancing the same anatomy of bourgeois respectability.
- The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) — Carries the Buñuelian dissection of bourgeois respectability as ritualized hypocrisy to its fullest formal expression, extending the seed's satirical target.
- Le Boucher (1970) — Descends the killer-amid-normalcy craft into provincial realism, letting a murderer coexist with placid bourgeois domesticity under a deceptively calm surface.
Appears in courses